


test

by 11dishwashers



Category: Original Work
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-27
Updated: 2018-11-27
Packaged: 2019-08-30 03:30:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 50,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16756816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/11dishwashers/pseuds/11dishwashers
Summary: f





	test

_ A Wing Chopped _

 

_ CHAPTER ONE(PROLOGUE) _

In New York, I'm told, the dust settles only on Tuesdays. Tuesdays are the organ that business breathes its life into, and the rest of the week is reserved for this business to so much as self consciously occur. On Mondays the ground revels over in a non-dermatological acne caused by worker heels- the high kind no less, though not for a high life- and on Wednesdays the prized possessions date the night with one open arm, the other elbow to elbow with alcohol light in percentage, and Thursdays are when one relieves oneself with musings about the weekend(this is the romance, because romance is all about musing through possibilities) and Fridays are when movie scenes are slated to function, though my noncommittal to these dark activities grows more prevalent by the year, of which there was been seventeen, and on Saturdays we have leisure that does not leave us time to stop and think, and on Sundays we dread. Tuesdays are reclusive and spent in a collective solitude. One does sit and think, but never of oneself: in New York, the population returns to alternate glass boxes and thinks about all the work they have done. The unemployed don't exist in theory... or so I'm told. 

Whereas I live uptight, my aunt lives upstate. She is the sole reason for my detriments; I do know my parents, but accordingly I have not reached a grasp nor a semblance of their characters, and thus my aunt is the woman whose flaws I draw inspiration from. In bundles- or perhaps thickets- they sat openly to me as a child. She did not visit with any frequency but I adored her so. When she did, it was in all black so that each wisp of texture from her clothes drew an outline against the night sky- out on the lawn, drawing further from me as she pecked my mother's cheeks and told her to 'get out of town', the fabric she was shrouded in would not move with the wind. Possibly, it was stubborn and refused to do so. Possibly, if a sky dwelling third party had bore witness to this, they wanted to instill this stark image in me as I was too perfect a child, but nonetheless her skirt did not move a lick and her jacket, which consisted of crosshatches and faux black fibers, wouldn't pick up flight either. Even now as she doesn't live in New York she is a New Yorker. Even now as she no longer taxes her biology with horrific nicotine breaks she is still a smoker. My father once pulled her aside at the Easter barbecue as she was plucking charcoal off a meat patty on a paper plate and affirmed that he did not condone her heroin usage. She admitted to him that she had never so much as mapped out the process of acquiring heroin, and would not be bothered to do so. I maintain that he believed her to be too cool for it to be natural, and that's why I began to deviate. 

In New York, I'm told, the dust settles only on Tuesdays. Regrettably, this is no stupor upon my own livelihood. I mentioned this because I recognised that it was a Tuesday and there was no dust to settle, as even dust can somewhat choose where it wells; here the wallpaper is beige and nothing is framed, and furthermore fireplaces act second fiddle to immersion, and drawing even from that they become grounded shelves with the slight turn that comes with all individualistic interior. I was no person until the day that I uptook the rounds and the edges and the indefinable plurals of what being my aunt required. I knew that the pond would not become New York just for me, but I also knew that I felt quietly enamoured in the presence of most boys who committed a glance to me and I knew that afterwards I could be met with glances upon glances- whether it was disgust or agreeability, it didn't matter so much as the initial swoop, the shutter, how the white cornea was misplaced along what we could observe as the visible eye, the pupil inching towards and focusing on my hands, my face, my much complimented figure, my overcoat fresh with a vintage air, my leather gloves I imagined I would don, my stockings not overly clean, my shoes in much the same state, my hair chipped at through analysis. I may have been Leah and yet I could sever her just as easily. I could douse her in gasoline, burn her away to memory that flickered orange. I could confine her within a state of mind and leave no trace that she existed. I could be a Jaqueline if I really wanted to. No one simply remains alive after not achieving what they desire, and I had never been an exception in any angle. However, as the dust didn't well on that Tuesday and my ceiling provided no entertainment, I wondered if I had it in me to exceed all expectations. Goddamn you, suburban jungle. Even skid row has the graceful chains of lights, and even the countryside adds opportunity to set a silhouette- or perhaps a guideline- for how others should perceive you upon a beautiful backdrop. All I could do was hold yellow clamshell Chinese takeaway boxes in what might as well be an estate's center and hope someone would gauge my greatness, of which I was sure I would attain. My core told me I should roll with the punches, and for once I listened without a single shred of ear left behind. 

 

_ CHAPTER TWO _

If only people were not so private about what enticed them. I quickly stood from my bed and observed my imprint upon the sheets(laid on thick, a Winter would call for it months in advance), the deep set lines wherein my legs had been laid out for a cold, harmless dissection. They weren't what I would consider ideal and yet I was oddly charmed by them. Still, I went to my wardrobe and removed all clothing that I had purchased in my 'girly girl' phase that seemed to exist to spite me, even in reminiscence. Throughout this phase I had made it commonplace to reference my own position as a girl and thus the traits that upheld this idea. I owned hairbands that I would consider wearing every day, twisting them and turning them before a mirror, but never would my hair fall as glorious as it did down. My scrunchies were bought for p.e and they were blue plaid, as if extracted from a nineties cheerleader's blossoming white coffin- or blossoming orange, should I account for the cremation and the firing squad. In an old plasticised-polyester washbag my mother had gotten me for all the travelling she'd conspired about I found three fake nails, each one more snaggled than the last and more likely to bead blood up from my fingertips so that the dark blue would stain red. I put these aside as I always felt this overwhelming urge, when among those who wore fake nails, to pull their skin off and wear them. There was this fear they could instrike and this intimidation tactic that was so vague yet present nonetheless, and I always believed that if I couldn't make people like me I'd just have to settle with making them be scared of me. Just my luck that my year was not one to enjoy. Academically, we were failures to the standard, ambivalent parent with the v flesh above the shirt collar and the three pairs of shoes. In terms of personality, we were quite the bunch to be avoided. There wasn’t one kid existed in my year who had not been soured by some awful life event. Victims of neglect and alcoholism and unhealthy porn addictions filtered out their frustrations through each other daily, and the standoffish crowd that didn't so easily admit their poison were somehow more obnoxious. I often theorise that there's something amiss in school uniforms that psychologically alter the brains to grow rowdier, quicker to flash in the pan, quicker to destroy and quicker to give a jagged temperament, but it was much better to wear the hellish dress pants-shirt combo than suffer being picked apart by everyone due to what one chose to wear. 

My aunt wouldn't care what she wore to secondary school and would go as far as to claim that those days were long behind her. Though this was true for most people, of course no one could quite forget the rat race in the end; it wasn't that it had a long lasting effect, but rather it was the cleanest and most obvious method to tell what people thought of you. For example, if you're weird you will be bullied, and if you're attractive your desirability will alter the actions of those around you accordingly. For me, it was growing all the more important that people should have the right opinion about me. Throughout childhood I hadn't been enjoyed to my fullest extent. Thoroughly, even, was I avoided, as I was a bit misshapen in the neurological department. This isn't to say that I'm marred with some mental illness(marred would be the term in this climate, at least) but rather that my interests could be deemed as off. I liked to fish but I hated the hook and the line and the water- this is between us two and us two solely(hah), but it wasn't the fishing that I liked in the first place, rather than the slippery silver that hake often donned, and how the red dribbled slick off their backs, misted up in the water and flumed outwards into blossoms. I liked how leaves buoyed and often wished that I could follow suit. Every day in school, I would draw fish on scrap paper until my collection spanned about twelve frying pans in post its. Every day in school, I would draw fish on scrap paper until my collection spanned about twelve frying pans in post its. Incompetence isn't something that ages to a fine bell curve, and thus I didn't understand my teachers worrisome frowns until my mother asked what drew me to fish and confessed that she'd been 'in the talks' with Ms. Lloyd. 

It was an innocent fixation I had for them. I've replicated this fixation many times, and still it sits with me awaiting the final bus from the terminus- here she is, Jaqueline, dressed up to the nines that I wanted to become sevens around me, if I was lucky. I could capture interest and I could rear it into love. My loneliness made it a necessity, even, and I reminded myself this as I placed each fake nail back into the bag. I had, at one point, planned to reorganise my belongings until this completeness washed over me yet it felt quite pointless. I would reorganise and I wouldn't have the base materials to replace. There was not yet any leather through the wardrobe doors and there was no punkish pantyhose leaving misshapen, vaguely terrifying forms along my chest of drawers, slumping out over the handles.I wanted something that felt warm for me to touch and me alone. Through any other person's hands my fashion would recoil and slip to the granite floor. But I hadn't gotten this fashion! It wasn't in my interests until my mid day crisis! Thus I closed my wardrobe doors once more and let out this sorry howl, prolonged and torturous as it was. My desk lamp wobbled through my tears and my bed distorted away from me verily but I still slumped towards it as if it had just struck me out of love. I would deal with this tomorrow. I had my whole life to become cooler and better and liveable as a habitat: tomorrow would do, and tomorrow I would have company. 

Sometimes I forgot the luck cast above me in which I possessed people to converse with. Tomorrow, there would be a face at a comfortable distance from mine that would ask me what I did the day before- this being today. I would regard it with happiness and say that it was 'another lazy day' for the heap. Then I would politely ask what said face had gotten up to the day before, too. I would care about the answer, chew at it back to the molar gums, taste it, absorb, it, and remain intoxicated by its consideration, the possible lie it was in order to obstruct, and then I would forget. Such is friendship. 

I was feeble since. It wasn't disillusionment that claimed me, but still I felt I'd much prefer its image- no, it wasn't this, and I wasn't sure I'd ever experience it regardless. My pillowcase was frayed at the edges because it had been my sister's before me. Wherever she was, I'd imagine that not enough detail had been inputted into the scenery that her latest pillowcase would look like mine in any way under the sun. My face rubbed against it, my arm wrapped around it, and I laid myself to rest, resigned towards cutting off the day and ushering in another wretched school crawl much sooner than I would've liked. 

Fittingly, I awoke the next day in a horrible state. My body was crumpled to a sheet and my heart was puttering about in slow motion, and I was for some unjustifiable reason upset that I could not look good in school that day. My washbag was on the dresser still, as if to taunt me. I was never one for the clean up and furthermore I didn't wish to misplace it so accesibley. Today I would not be observed by others; I, on the other hand, would be caught up in the crevice and the pasty glued skin that confined a nervous system within me- translucent upon glass shop windows which I walked by on the street, in the bathroom mirror as I made conscious efforts not to pucker my lips at myself, and right then and there with my eyes trained on my shins as they curled down the mattress. I pushed myself out from the slumber and followed my mind downstairs despite it all. The kitchen had been malnourished since my mother finally attained a job at a hairdressers and had been swallowed up by this overwhelming grief: she had trained for years to give people fringes and as soon as it was accessible to her knotted hands she realised, quiet and justly, that she hated it, and now spent weeks in her room sulking. My father didn't realise he was misogynistic and thus never bothered to uptake any household chores. I, of course, would not offer my hand to a shopping basket unless it was guaranteed to fall in love with me(in a vocal manner, as I'm sure you're aware, since I'm a sucker for that kind of thing). There was a huge habit extending out of me, flushed pink and bloodied like a tumour; every morning I took money from my savings and used it to buy chipper that I'd cram down into my gut upon the church steps. In the waking hours there was a grey mist that plagued it, in which teenage girls would envelope themselves with and smoke their cigarettes. Some brought company or pulled it from other girls with insults, but most were there alone- this was why I didn't shy away from it. I've mentioned that I've known a friend or two but certainly none to brag about, and certainly none that would indulge in the second hand nicotine fumes and awful, burned tinge that alluded to all greasy food. This morning, since I was in a bad state, I made definite sure to realise that the chipper was much needed and not an  _ indulgence. _ Rather, it was prescription for a soul that had not yet brimmed with beauty, but would do so soon. My eyebags were flooding purple in spades. My school bag might as well have been replaced with three bricks strung together with masking tape- the industrial kind- and my hair was matted no matter how much the brush teased its way through. Goodbye, I did not feel the need to say. I doubt I have to tell you that if my aunt was among us it would've been a different story. 

Goodbye, I did not feel the need to iterate even inwardly. Instead I closed the door behind me and prepared to be picked at by all this rancid cold air that you cannot feel yet must imagine. How horrendous it is, and on a monday no less! Tuesday, godspeed you, Tuesday soothe me through another hour, another hour, another hour, this cold, this freezing cold, and yet an hour remains ceaseless until I die, an hour, an hour and I'll be in the classroom wherein students go to suffer, an hour until school work becomes a necessity, an hour until I'm made the fool before my peers, an hour until my ugliness becomes remarked by prying eyes, an hour and another and I'll help myself to another.

A family across the way were making a horrible decision; they were moving in. I watched them from afar just to order my eyes around for no good reason. The youngest girl was wrapped up in a putrid yellow parka that seemed to rot the longer I focused on it, first cracking away at the scenes and then becoming closer and closer to the shade one might extract from an unwashed, limescaled toilet bowl, and her plaints were constructed with hair that had been taught to brush backwards until it clumped. However, it was glossy- I will say that. And when her head lolled back up from inspecting her Lelli Kellys she no doubt had an unconditional, obnoxious love for, her eyes met mine for a split second and seemed to comprehend the disdain I had for her. Then her mouth sloped into a jeer as though mocking me due to this and in retrospect I can call this the first spot of self doubt and shamefulness I felt because of the Woodsen family. I don't often enjoy emotions that make me feel dirty and as this didn't stem from any sexual roots I didn't enjoy this either. It was then that the curtain was ripped from the rail and I saw, writhing upon the stage, my very own attitude issue; how my wrath expanded when I was pissed off. I ducked my head down and did not collect my first impressions for the rest as I was quite embarrassed. She was insulting me, though I couldn't do anything about it. The girl didn't care what I thought at all! How foreign an idea, that anyone could be scolded yet not scalded in the same breath- therefore, I tried not to huff my tears out all the way to the chipper, but I was in that grand affected spirit that stabbed whenever a blindspot was present to it. The chipper was busy but I didn't care to notice, despite my deadline drawing closer. Sometimes I enjoy things drawing closer, or in hypothesis I do, but in this case it was far from condoned. 

There were some funny characters surrounding the heat cases. The fillets were in said cases, though none were vibrant enough to poke out as 'edible' at all- still, my desire burned on with the intentional slight of hand that allowed me to believe it had any business doing so. I hadn't forgotten my earphones so my morning had improved a marginal amount, though nothing to write home about since my music taste was paling with the effort I'd abandoned at sea. I turned it up loud enough that the confrontation with the girl behind the counter was punctuated by some vague ringing in the mid distance; this was what lead me to believe my eardrums were being demolished. Motivation was pricey of course and a worrisome outlook cost even more and I left with the aluminum foil burning through my skin, dissatisfied in the deep end. The lights above were shaking through the water in such a way that made me wish I could black out right there. I'd be raised by the dead oxygen in my cells, up to the surface whereupon I could be examined by a coroner and all the black in my hair would dilute into the chlorine, sloppy, resounding a low pitch. A coroner would appreciate with all their might seeing as I would be far too dead to notice any holes bearing into my face. My neck, even as I'm alive, remains slender and bends like an arm- this is something I've never came to understand about myself. I can only imagine how strange it appears when attached to a deceased person. 

On the steps, I was for the most part alone- saying this, perhaps it was more a case of 'I might as well have been'. Among me were these grey girls decked out in stiff uniforms that took precedence over their attractiveness, much to my delight. I supposed that if polyester could stifle anything it might as well be the beauty that others besides myself seemed to possess. I was thinking about this with one hand groping about the chip foil when my eyes found my friend on the cobblestone. She was commuting, I guessed, after considering the motions her peg legs went about in order to cover decent ground- she was overbearingly short, if such a phenomenon should exist, and her skinniness served to make her proportionate in this regard. She had this air about her that you would expect from a feminine android in that her head bobbed with each motion and her eyes often held no emotion or feeling and exerted no sentience to speak of. Her name was Lauren, and still I could feel nothing but fondness when I saw her. Though it was always her hand that twisted the knife in my esteem, I still fell for her charms and her stupid triangle mouth so soon after I'd believed myself to be over it that it was quite appalling. I was overcome with a need to be acknowledged by her. Let me say this once: it was only to be acknowledged by her, as anyone's attention is not one which I can thrive beneath. Yet I felt a bit sick that she might catch me feeding fat to my heart on the steps, so much so that a tear threatened me by the door until I was running over without thinking about it, how it might appear to the other girls. 

"Lauren!" I said, god help me, and, "Lauren," I said again, for some reason I wasn't sure about- my suspicions are that it was to dig my grave an inch or two deeper. She was far from me yet there had only been one stone laid between us. Even when breathing her air I felt that I was stealing from a cradle, and it blotched every bond that wrapped our friendship together with this awful undeservedness I couldn't shake no matter how hard I tried. When she turned towards me I was struck with guilt upon seeing her waste time on my horrendous self, and when her eyes widened to gorgeous, cockroach sized discs I wanted nothing more than to be apprehended by satan to avoid confrontation. My body dissolving into the soil that was concealed by pavement and pulled towards a core containing something I could never understand. I pushed my toes together which only made the leather scuff. Was this how the shy population was doomed to act? My premature foolishness astounded me- I was grateful to have a friend, though never enough so that I enjoyed having them in the first place, let alone being around them. They only ever seemed to make things harsher. I wanted more than anything to discover that life sometimes left room for softness, perhaps even tender treatment. Still, the more I pondered the more out of reach it fled. 

"Ah, morning," said Lauren(to me, would you believe). I noticed then that she was wearing a scarf which rested in a thick mound about her neck. Before I could overheat my brain some more with this information it fizzled away into a long purple strip. I didn't know what to do about this, so I focused on standing until she opened her mouth to speak some more dread to my name. "I assume you're headed to school?"

"Yeah, you, uh, assumed right," I said, already quite disappointed in myself. Although disappointment is tacked to ideas where one was hoping for more, right on that cobblestone I had no hope for myself but still felt a bitterness wade through me. I pulled at my hair until it fell down my jaw and shuttered vaguely in my peripherals; any mound of helpless distraction would do me well here. I wasn't sure what it was about interaction that seemed to grind my gears quite so much. If I had only read about the human race through second hand bathroom material I'm sure I would be delighted to welcome one warm into my mind(and my heart and brain and mouth, hah) until they could invade and bodysnatch all that they desired, relentless, loose against my skull- I would be giddy and affected and they would appear, to me, with a certain vitality unreflected by what I saw dead in that moment. She dangled before me just as my aunt did. Her curls were another intrusion caught up in the wind, her outline much softer than anything previously observed. When she spoke again I almost sank to my knees as most service can be paid verily in that manner. 

"I'm going that way too, let's walk together," she said. It wasn't intentional but some part of the statement must have been composed in a laboratory to throw me off my game- perhaps it was the initial shock despite us being friends for years, or perhaps it was the daunting effort which packaged all sociability. Yet I wanted to know more. What kept her up at night, what made her weary? Were these questions too personal for two friends? As if I had the tools to know. Quietly I lent myself to her and a bristle sounded when I stepped forward with one shoe, alarming almost. My hair fluttered like that for the rest of the morning at my side; no dust. 

 

_ CHAPTER THREE _

Soon it would be Tuesday and I would be the only person to notice or regard it as an anomaly. I knew then that each and every person I'd ever made contact with saw it as a weekly occurrence, but to me something far deeper could be uncovered about the simple, fond-yet-not-warm Tuesday. After all, shouldn't something happen even if the dust can't exist the settle? There has to be some observable change in something or someone, somewhere within my proximity, just one that has escaped me each time it diverts, or fled out from a short grasp. 

Lauren told me something that made me think this true. It was no longer a phenomenon so much as an unproven truth. At the school gates where the black poles were woven together with de facto barbed wire, the sun had beamed through into white slots on the ground and the aforementioned mist was bursting by the seams. We had been passing through the common grounds with the sloping evergreens that shook when someone spoke and I was growing frightfully cold, so much so that I was longing for the space heaters in the classroom to return to me some life. She'd paused right before the railings and stopped to look at me(an action I found most intimidating, though perhaps I don't need to tell you that) and said, as the violins shrieked, as I stammered, as each woodworm in the grass became a corpse, unaffected through the midst, eyes large to focus yet opting out, blondness left behind, "my sister died last night. Leah, do you have a sister?"

What was most worrisome had to be the unchanging mannerisms. She wasn't delicate and her face went stagnant, but it betrayed no signs of hurt or even change. This would allude to a Tuesday spent bothering about in my room, but for then I could only look back at her as my spine dragged oddly from a sudden weight influx within my school bag which had been discovered in a moment of sheer panic. "I'm so sorry," I said. 

However, she didn't seem to hear me- "do you have a sister?" she went on, one hand dragging up her coat and resting upon her scarf where it was most frayed. It looked like acrylic; this horrendously vanity fair kind dyed through sieves within the finest textile houses across the country, possibly even harvested from goats or kids or what have you. She was a wealthy that annoyed people around her due to flamboyance rather than jealousy. Nobody in my class wanted to be her except for me, though I'm sure they'd send her off a cliff if the option was available to their manicured hands. I myself hadn't the courage when it came to accessories, always being the rarest positive upon a model. They were difficult to find and it was even more difficult to smother their inherent foolishness- dominating their unacceptable, inaccessibility had distorted into a task in which I would never find myself able without some serious changes. For the fifth time in perhaps the past minute I fantasised about cutting through my black curtained hair and morphing the things that lay within until they were prone to admiration. The place was messy, unwatched for years; this wasn't me and yet it was unshakably so, inciting beady, watery eyes, requesting a drink, receiving through a strain. I wanted to be blind quite suddenly. Not only would it force my hands out from self indulgent insecurity, but it would also solve some of the conceit I suffered greatly from by my own choice. "Don't tell me you're sorry if your sister's not dead," she said then, and for a split second my mind reverted to belittling her- rude, naive creature dressed in old money- before I admitted to myself that it wasn't a flaw, but rather an avalanche drawn from fresh trauma. There were blood vessels still spilling about her brain and she wouldn't mop it up for years. Even then, some stains would remain forever. I shouldn't expect her to praise my politeness when the cold claimed her then made her as if a bed consisted of pretty girl human flesh, pink with luminosity, and sad girl human skin, tingeing in a low light. It occured to me that I was expected to react to this outburst. There was not an acceptable response that I could fathom, though my brain was still lapping up 'wisdom' expected of fourteen year olds and I wasn't excelling at school to say the least. 

My aunt had done well at school; it was effortless. Her school books were dusted between the pages and they had laid dormant upon her desk chair for over six years. Still, she had done well in a move that wished to wring the life out of me! When I visited my grandparents last year, I remember faintly how they had preserved her room in a nice state(perhaps if she were to die in vehicular manslaughter they'd forever hold her character hostage within the intentional, applied, fashionable messiness) and I had wandered in when any small talk I could make was so miniscule it could no longer be provoked from a tourette's sufferer, and almost in a cruel manner had her books jumped out at me as worthless but only when shifted in her hands, their covers ripped to bits and drawn at aimlessly. It was the one thing that made me consider a very serious prospect, this being that I might not have what it takes to be her. 

No. 

Stop. 

Leah, stop there. 

Leah... You make this difficult on yourself. Challenges are nice when forgotten about, don't you think? Leah? Leah, are you there? Leah?

In New York, I would not suffer a Tuesday because I would not be in New York. Oh lord! I would certainly never gain access to this part of myself that lapsed through the night life! This would not cut it. Leah. 

Thus I hugged Laura for a brief moment that was treated pessimistically in that there was this infinite quality forced upon it. It was the first time we had been so close and the idea that death was the one thing that could bring someone close to my ribcage made me laugh. After all, weren't ribcage imprints made to be shared? If it were up to me, the world wouldn't have to accompany the delicacy with fresh death, out in the open air. We stood there for this unending interlude wherein people conspired about us- girls wondered what we were doing, why we were doing it, how, who, what, and the boys were more focused on Laura's behind because it had become quite the spectacle ever since her ex gave some minute, slobbery and fairly mean details on the way it existed in a bedroom climate. Together we were unfavourable. It was what killed me- even Laura was rendered unfavourable in my arms. My god, you should have seen her. Within grief she had founded a new method to prettiness. Her tears weren't pleasant but they shocked the system so and her eyes looked their best when listless as they never focused on others. If they focused on me, I was sure all potential within me would replenish only to die shortly afterwards. She made everything pointless and I couldn't hate her, but my strangeness instead slipped down a certain devastation with some dry water. 

We went to school. Lucky me, being in a first world country that required such frivolous things- though I say this due to hatred more than any sense(of which I possessed little yet would soon collect in abundance). I made paling attempts to deflower my own ignorance until it bloomed fulsome. I don't know why I expected some unknown genius to respond when I screamed inwardly, but it didn't happen that Monday. I wanted myself a Tuesday but dreaded the disappointment it would hold. Everything was a bit awry this morning and my class seemed to feel it too, and this was what made the winter flush insufferable the most. Our first teacher began to spearhead his idea that French literature should join the general speaking exercises on the final exams- hand in hand they would formulate a white braided, ivory wreath photographed above his most tenacious students, roses dipping from the air and sticking to crowns, les couleurs magnifiques and other boast worthy adjectives straight from an enriched word store section in a text book. He added footnotes to himself prematurely until his speeches became quite hard to follow. This lead to much talking out of turn, met in a vicious pursuit by his complaining once more. 

Longing for extricant, I pushed my chin down into my hand and took off. I didn't take off any body parts but I exchanged my human exterior for that of a fish. Sometimes, it seemed like I wasn't quite over my childhood fascination with aquatic creatures in most forms. Though I wished it would warp into a fetish for something fair and youthful such as the occult I couldn't help but play the loser from time to time. It was something I exceeded in amnd something that brightened each ugly black strand that graced my scalp all the way down to my mid-neck in fragmented chops, each casting spindly shadows along the capillaries. I could switch arms for fins and observe my livelihood become nicer, more fond. Fish were caught up in doing what they'd come to do and never seemed to grace others with their opinions, much less fill their scales with wrath for the highly esteemed, as no esteemed, individual fish would have to exist. To you this might come off as boring but in my solitary case I could dig for this beautiful utopian society until my life guttered out. The reefs would ripple in technicolour beneath the sun and grow a mystique with the dusk. I thirsted to break out from my cage in order to join this painting but it was never quite possible, by physical means or otherwise.Still, I remained for the most part seated until my legs insisted on returning home- it might be surprising for a teenager not to desire bed at all times, but in my case the house where I sleeped caused just as much escapism as any classroom would. 

For example, upon my immediate entry my mother demanded(note the word choice) that I would shuffle through her wardrobe and remove the nice items of clothing. This was a chore that I had just found out was exclusive to my twisted family and that my friends had never considered doing- I would pick outfits for my mother to wear during the week as her mind was currently preoccupied with her mental breakdown, though she 'did not wish to thrust this truth upon others who may view her in the meantime' and didn't want her colleagues to make snide comments when she showed up to work donning half a curtain twisted up in radiator pipe lining just because she was far too stressed to see. I didn't like this chore because I had not yet developed the ability to have an informed opinion on fashion. Also, the lights were forever low in her room which meant that my eyes strained about eight pairs of the same beige dresspants before I came about a darker coloured one(as darker coloured apparel becomes king before my eyes). The one retreat became the radio that fed off the scraps on her locker table. Perhaps she could feel pity as she allowed me to play music while I went to work on her button ups, and she was never in my presence long enough to judge my poor disc choices. At first I would listen excruciatingly to the FM stations but over time I began throwing money about on physical release CDs, which leads me now to my sorting alongside slippery vocals. 

I reveled in the most basic compositions to the eye. Even one as untrained as the one I bargained with could tell when something was expired within a generic outfit, and thus I paired black dresspants with white shirts until my hands met the horizon. She would later complain that accusations about her wearing the same thing everyday would wade through the front room until she was hacking up her weight watchers breakfast into the staff toilet, but I would assure her that it made for good business to stick to oneself so relentlessly. To this very day I still amn't sure whether she was among arrogant, snobby, ignorant fools in black bin bag aprons or if she was suffering from acute paranoia. I suspect the second one of course, and it would take video evidence to prove otherwise for me. 

The 'rest' didn't stop there. Afterwards I had more legroom with which I could compose myself further. As you know, my quest(as you were, unsure wording that slips off the tongue far too easily to be unnoticeable) is to capture the aura my aunt imposes upon others- or bluntly, to become Jaqueline. She had been living her life unaware of how good it was and how much I longed to steal it right from beneath her; this upset me so, dressed up in a six foot long house coat bound by a mismatched school tie, observing my own clothes and discounting the 'rest' further from myself. I complained about doing this for my mother but in my case it was much the same. I tried to construct an outfit that was reminiscent of Jaqueline down to accusations of imitation, and each one would be scoffed away by myself. 

No one would know her by resemblance anymore; she would reside to a name scanned over in the family tree. Generations down she would be seen as the stem from which a Leah could delight others, charm others and possibly become friends with them. People would see a laugh within me that would be captured in photographs and weak men's hearts. Perhaps I would even sway some stronger willed men into becoming avid fans and they would contemplate my inner workings for months before at once overcoming this lust. They would stew in Parisian hotel rooms- viewing openly the Eiffel tower from whatever point and whatever light beam- all the while wishing it was my New York flat and stable to glistening romance which was lined with lipstick marks down to hell and up to heaven. Beyond that, even! 

This was what fueled my sorrowful evening as I rearranged cheap clothing until my heart gave way to dinner, then to second helpings, then to the swiftness in which sleep imposes upon its victims. Across the city it was a given that Laura was unable to sleep, shaken up in her bed until her blonde excellence frizzed up at the ends, reduced to white lines about her head. Maybe her family had an official mourning over dinner some more or maybe it was a silent event with an intimidating shadow; but either way I was sure as I could be, for the first time in recorded human history, that I did not want to cry where she cried. So much for a Monday.

 

_ CHAPTER FOUR _

It wasn't a dream that meant much- to me or from me, either way it dissolved red with the curtains and the light. It wasn't a dream that meant much as I was sure most inward ideals I possessed were so far undiscovered, and though the subconscious takes its chance at night I still think I've buried the hatchet so far within that not even it will catch me handed. 

Do boring people dream? I hoped so with my eyes set upon the grey mist, for if they did it would separate me from them with a tedious ease. I feared them because I feared that one day I would come into contact with one and realise, with a start so heavy it guillotined, that I am one and the same; how a complex pink mass embedded in our skulls could ever grow montone was beyond most scientists, yet there was still a population that others simply did not want to be trapped in a conversation with. 

It was my Tuesday and I woke up with my hands already shaking. This was why I despised Tuesdays, after all. I never grew fond but I never quite overcame my anticipation each week. 

In any case, the initial sting and realisation that I still had a day of school laid out before me was enough to draw some wobbles from my eyes(which I suspected had suffered enough liner to survive more rounded, monotonous class work for a lifetime, and perhaps even to be sated into a belief that life had no room to grow harsher). Nevertheless I left the house as any dignified human would. My emotions were veiled by the cold air, my collar flattened out to white shards against the horrendous uniform jumper. There was something about the Autumn temperature that called for a collective hibernation at the earliest possible hour and I wanted nothing more than to rot away a lifetime in my sheets- among the fantasy, one would find the ideal wherein my feet would be covered by the duvet, which had yet to be replicated by my real life self. 

The Woodsen's across the way had settled in well enough. I didn’t know them yet, but in retrospect I should hardly have given notice to the precision along the drive and the stark red shape that the car rested as when only surrounded by grey pavement. They swept the foliage off each dusted concrete tile until there was no way of telling where it went. Through the window there sat the little girl I had quite suddenly grown to be intimidated by just yesterday morning; you see, I was a bit scared that she would mock my head on attitude once more, of which I hoped I would never have to remark again. Her bony figure was slumped across the window sill, evidently not concerned in regards to her absence from school nor drive to attend. There was a book in her hands that my vision couldn’t make head or tail of and yet I yearned to know what it could be.    
I had noticed yesterday that her face included no slopes or bumps and left a shallow line of shade along the pavement. Her eyes sunk in, taking moments to declutter, and there was a brief moment where they flitted to meet mine- I say brief since but a moment later they were taken with her book again. In all my life I had never gotten such an unhealthy impression from a child. There was something so smarmy and malnourished about her, how astounding her greyish, withering complexion fitted to her age until she looked old and needlessly so, and her hair was ratty and matted in small packages that slumped about her head, donning a stylish, formless, beige dress that some might consider 'fashionable or worse, 'adorable'.

I couldn't understand. Dresses didn't come quite as easy to those of us who had yet to unshroud their skeleton. Past my prime, I still had yet to understand the lengths my limbs went through to function- I didn't like looking at myself very much and it wouldn't be a surprise if it turned out that a kneebone was blocking the blood from getting to my brain. 

I was only there for a few moments but in that time the front door had lurched along a bronze hinge and a figure had gazed out onto the lawn. They had a sprinkler rolled out though no flowerbeds to mention; it sat in a useless, pathetic state before the unpainted wall. I was intrigued enough to falter just a slight amount, yet enough so that the figure took shape across the way: it was a boy who must've been the same age as me with a dressing gown that exceeded his form. He pulled at the navy cable about his waist and- I felt this was becoming a theme with this new family- met my eyes, quite sparing, perhaps even a non-action, and his hair fell in a curve when he tilted his head with curiosity. A warmth overcame me, however it was not the one that breeds romance, much to my displeasure- rather it was the embarrassment and the confusion at such a non-glance turning me away from the possible danger. Because wasn't the judgment always that possible danger? After all, it had caused me a misfortune so strong in the past that I felt I would shit my organs out when confronted by another human. They would leak black liquid all over the place in a huge, almost endless puddle, and the intestines would strip purple. I doubt I need to explain how the lungs would ripple away their remaining seconds while the alveoli pulsed. 

My legs regained some control and signalled that I must walk on! So that was the point I reached, warm all over without the charm or endearment that followed such admissions, branches swaying overhead, shoes cracked to the brims. New shoes were a long overdue purpose; it was a pity that the kind I'd asked for were denied by my father, who had said they were too * _ clunky _ * a week back. They might've been too clunky for school, but that was besides the point. There was that overlapping chiqueness found between builders couture and gothic anti-architecture that my chin bobbed up for. I'd stowed my desire away for a while, dispensing it into the display cases within each store I passed, but it was a guest far more familiar to me than I was fond of it and it was never quite satisfied no matter how much I tore off the bone just for its pleasure. It had tided over when I'd began my expedition with the catalogues, but this ran out when its liver digested the  luminosity and crunched on the leather and threw back to me even more shocking, redhot desire-- for shoes, yes. Need I mention that the soles were thick as sponges yet had captured thrice the density? Always with the footwear when it came to distractions, all hours of the day. Still I am convinced that I could attend a wake and find reason to loop it back to those sixteen hole punched shoes that would conceal up to half of my boney shin. I suspect this is a real fear. One day, if prevented from affixations, I'm sure I would die instantly without a lick of suffering. 

I hadn't thought about the family for a while. In school, I was more concerned with throwing discrete looks towards Laura, as if propieting a candid into a mental dossier, and wondering why the mourning hadn't yet killed something in her physical self. It wasn't that I expected her body to be drained and hollow- I'm sure if it was I wouldn't have the x ray vision to notice- but something would surely have to be present or absent. If said thing didn't plague the way she acted(which, by the way, it hadn't since yesterday morning) than it must've left a nice little bald spot on her scalp, handfuls of the gold hair in the shower, a horror associated with that conditioner scent when it ascended to its strongest, hibiscus like state, or perhaps a loss of appetite which would quickly collect in the bucket until her bones proved to be quite interesting. I didn't enjoy treating her like my solution to boredom or a roachian spectacle but she made it far too easy on herself. When she strolled into school this morning my heart was arrested, and not in a gooey sense that someone such as myself wouldn't receive from other girls; it was the obviousness with which she conducted her general activities, the initial reach of her table and the placing of the pencil case before anything else was committed to. My watching was possibly ill intentioned and not accompanied by any pointed well wishing- I was, in a vague sense, hoping that she would recover soon, but the weight of it was that I didn't understand how unaffected she was by the scenario. It was true that I had never experienced a real death. Pets had died, family members had deteriorated, but real death isn't as rooted in biology as many a person believes. To me, real death requires some care for the subject and I had yet to experience much care for anyone. 

It wasn't that I had no capacity to find good things about other people and it wasn't that everyone about me held no positives, but I was aware that when their hands uncoiled cold it wouldn't be my heart in their palms nor their best interest, however unavailable to them or anyone else. The one person a rupture in my heart was dedicated to was my aunt and even then it was accompanied with a running, a need for further referral and interview; it would take a lot to run a lap around my spite and further to remain worthwhile in the midst of doing so. I admired her but it made me a ruin. I wanted nothing more than to steal her identity, discard her being until it was me all along and until I'd forgotten she was ever separate from myself. Effortless. Cool. Conservative, almost. Never once had she displayed undignified emotion in an uncalled for manner. I needed to find some ignorance quickly so I could forget that I was, in fact, an imposter in some ways. 

Laura approached me, much to my endless fascination, some time after the final class. At first she dressed it up as a need to discuss Macbeth(suddenly it seemed to entice her more than any literature we'd studied before could, but it was awry... she hadn't once displayed an interest in Shakespeare in the five years I'd known her) and stood with it cribbed up to her torso so it lay flat. The cover contained a skull framed by some gabled border and a raven feather dipped out from where a human's eye might've once been. The end sheened this orange dribble up the length and to the left a candle stood, and she said to me, "ah, Leah, your copy is so much nicer than mine! I'm jealous."   
She obviously wasn't jealous- only the pathetic grew jealous over such worthless things. I was reminded of myself by this statement and suppressed a snort, all the while formulating a coherent, fairly normal sentence in my brain, which to me was a science all in itself. I wasn't sure what a normal sentence entailed but all I knew was I could recognise them by ear. Also, I was determined that one day I could be confident in this science enough to stray from it through a controlled testing. Normalcy would no longer make uniqueness obsolete, though this was a privilege so far unreachable to me. By the time I responded only three girls besides us remained in the classroom, examining some art tacked to the door and laughing- it was a picture of some Romeo and Juliet lookalikes composed in a compromising position that some younger student had done a while back, and it was frightfully easy to jab at without a forked tongue even exiting the mouth. I liked to make it my business to know everyone in my year even if they didn't know me, and from observing the three crowns of brown hair facing away from me I recognised them, thinking that they were Laura's friends who were not friends with me, surprise surprise. "Thanks, it was my brother's," I said. All old things had this extra appeal, after all. The pages were marked with neon post its whenever Macbeth made a gorey proclamation; my parents believed this obsession was why my brother studied for medicine and eventually got in in the first place. His room had gone unused for three years now and the clinical biology diagrams still leeched off the tacky wallpaper. From time to time as the night ran through its thickest, darkest section I'd pass by it while walking to the bathroom and see a flash, two uncanny valley eyes staring back at me, retinas bloodied as if they were plucked from a real human and stitched through the paper. From then on I made sure to watch my feet move across the landing. Otherwise I would suffer far too greatly through such subtle means. 

"So," Laura said, glancing to the girls I suspected her friendship with. They had never treated me poorly but they gave off these waves of sinisterness- the composed sort that was well concealed by ponytails, only showed up when others were vulnerable, and loomed behind thinfeel pantyhose that glistened beneath low light fixtures. I longed for this too and it dismayed me that I could barely find my legs beneath the caked concrete block I might as well have been. "There's this party at my friend's on friday- you don't know her, she's from a different school- and if you're free on Friday we should, like, go! It'll be fun."

Partying so soon after what had happened? Well, I supposed coping mechanisms formed along individual feathers. But lord, must I pray now? Why present to me such a divine circumstance when others are about, for I cannot descend to my knees and speak the holy word! Oh, ray of light that beamed down so unjustly, my gratitude knew no bounds in that moment and my next breath was fully realised by this overwhelming, compassionate gesture of which I had never known by name. I was overcome with a happiness so astute it would conquer the most pessimistic and reclaim they're frowns until they distorted along with the chemicals that were shuttering up to the brain. It was a purpose, simply put, given to me, an alchemy untaught for the failed, worse halves of the past centuries and I held this gold with such wonder that the tight security grappled with the loose preservation. I wanted to leap into her arms and for once let my hands affect her face's composition; running up and down the sides without the pink undertones. Instead I stood and bore this grand smile that I suspected might've been overbearing. My first party was to be on a Friday and throughout childhood I had never thought it'd occur in the last place. "Sounds great," I said with much difficulty, the monarch wings looming beneath a lid in my esophagus. They would push up ever so often and I would be forced to smile. When they angled their forms properly I felt the soft touch along my throat lining and kept in a cough by sheer force of will. "I'd love to go, yeah."

"Right, well I'll text you the details later then..." she paused, all drawn out, and it hit me that she was searching for an escape until tomorrow would do us part. I imitated checking the time and wistfully longing for a bus, eyes focused out the window. It made little sense seeing as she was well aware that I walked to and from school each day- sometimes in her company- but she took her shot- "sorry about this but I'm sort of in a rush home-"

"That's okay. Thanks for telling me about the party," I said. I had never been the bearer of mercy beforehand and it thrummed some excitement through me. To think that this would all be executed by the aforementioned divinity on a Tuesday, and it was joyous to think that whatever it was up there knew me well enough to grant it this one time. 

I departed that day in a very unique way, as it was the sole instance of my happiness extending past the weekend for more than six hours. This was accounting for and nodding toward the Sunday depression which I am no exception to and know as though it were my terminal illness. The railings were no longer wrought iron, nor did they have to implant a harshness when affected by light along the eye. The mist contained this certain beauty one had noticed before but just now did I look up to consider it, even in a brief moment of tranquility, my heart slopping beats together as necessary until I could attend this party. 

I had so much work to do beforehand. The truth was that I was still far from cool. Of course coolness and some degree of smugness is necessary at all parties, since it invites others to discover all the factors that went into your status as a cool person in the first place. If I was a Jaqueline people would ask ‘ _ why is she a Jaqueline? _ ’ and it would be an open, exposed air in which my strangeness could burst or maybe inflate. I could explain my love for fish and their movement, how their fins tilted and how they glided through liquid as though it were an absence. This was the undeniable heights that my dream had reached. 

First and foremost, it was easier to look nice than to act nice, although people believed quite the opposite; they didn’t realise that abhorrence, however concealed, still affected the niceness of an individual no matter how inconsequential it was altered to be. If I had any trace lining my abhorrence I might as well have killed a dozen for these shoes I’d mentioned earlier. This would render me fair enough but it wasn’t what I lusted after each night, sheets stained and eyes sheathed. I felt I should tackle my appearance before I even thought about the iceberg and the personality. Beneath the waves it was too muddy to extricate the pleasant state just yet, and thus I walked home in this longwinded way that passed most pseudo-fashionable boutiques accessible to anyone who lived in this godforsaken no goodman’s land. Many had awfully inflated prices but the pay off would be worth it- if I ever doubted this all I had to do was picture a scenario wherein I would entice a suitor to view me at the party, though this takes for granted the prospect that it wasn’t indeed just a sick joke by Laura’s mouth. I could’ve been deceived and if so, I’d already be hook, line and sinker, but this didn't’ haunt me to the expected extreme. I knew if it fell apart by the seams I’d possibly run away to my brother, who would take a while to open up to me and finally compact me in his opened arms when I agreed to do the basic household chores. This was the plan: I had a kitchen apron with some laminated rosemary crawling up the edges and I could wash it down with a j-cloth. Becoming a cleaning lady would not require much thought of which I would most dispense into get rich quick prospects, as truly what is one without money to pad out the fall? 

If anything, I could buy makeup or surgery; under pressure, I would state that my eye bags could do with some hot wax to flatten beneath the skin and my nose was a bit too jibby jabby for my tastes. At the party I would carry a red cup around and drink from time to time, but never enough that the alcohol drained at a hat drop, so that it would have this formal excuse and remain concealing various facial features when necessary. Someone attractive could pass by and I would have to imitate scritching an eyelash out from beneath my eye, thus extending the red plastic before my nose which was in anyone's best interests when you stop and think. 

Of course, there's no method I could utilise to convey the misdemeanour to you who only observes staunchly. Another drop of the story plummets from the laminated rim before you can even sniff at it. There was a lot to be said about how things unwitnessed will die as such, and right now I felt quite glad of it- at home I moped about in my room once more, which always seemed to slick my being with this horrible, affected mood that sprang up with no vitality my esteem could pick from. My dressing gown fluttered about me at this light speed, carried about by an air that wished something weird of it it could not accomplish. It was almost as though the fairy-like, perhaps angelic nature it picked up there in the low light was an uncredited piece that had missed its shot. For one thing I kept the light on until the late hours wherein the large tree extending out from across the way showed up as magnified barbed wire upon my curtain's underside, shone through by an orange glow. As well as this, my hair was scraped and plattered onto that part of every unattractive girl's head that slopes oddly at the front and gives way to a flat tile of head mound at the back upon which the baby hair flickers outwards. I didn't do much to make anything worthwhile, nor had I felt any need. It was moreso a case of gloominess that prevails in procrastination. It was merciful that my temper excused such idleness, and so even the Tuesday passed like nothing. 

I could do more. My sheets were awfully inviting- if I can even manage this with a straight face, perhaps moreso than usual- and this was why it comforted me in a way. I had asked to borrow the radio my mam kept locked away in her room, the one I stole from time to time. She hadn't said yes but she hadn't said no either and her expression wasn't one that carried any meanness nor splendour. This was her usual state by the day's end. She grew to hobble about upon her year old slippers with her thirty year old feet already veiny as if beaten by an immense evil, and in a daze she struck her presence through my mind as our paths were crossed. 

It had been a while since some faith could be ignited between her and her husband. They had born me too soon for their ages and since spent many a time apart. Some people thrived beneath such clinical conditions, but I can tell you right now that I don't believe my mother to be one of them. It pained me when I was for the most part not so concerned with myself. Now I could reach a brief distress when I noticed new patches in her eyebrows(white, though they glistened like silver) and return to what I had known, what I would know, what I wished to know and what knew me. 

The party- this stellar thing! Its shelf life bore no limit to its beauty. I brushed my teeth at ten and watched in the mirror as the suds crawl down each off white pillar until they tinted my lower lip which had become this eery blood red, thinking about the whole ordeal. It was rare for excitement to have me back, but boy was its dining room a spectacle. It was as if each worry had manifested itself into a liquid I could capture in two hands without it spilling through my webbing and this pleased me so. Still, I felt I was under no illusion. Sometimes people didn't act upon what they really saw in a situation, it wouldn't go unnoticed that Laura's sister had passed in such raw memory(I am quite aware that, with the information I have been given, it was nothing she had done that caused it, but still it goes without saying that it's impossible not to harvest a true horror from within when one had profited from a vicinity to innocence and goodness just there); maybe she had grown spiteful to those of us who had never experienced the same gist. I would rather her pain not come from me, but surely you understand the problem I had with drawing close downstairs, hugging the shadows to the kitchen doors, finding leisure in an image- this being the blade when it was first cold and unpressed by human apparel, and this being skin- returning it to where it had strayed from in my mind, watching the blood soak out through my father's esaphogus by my own hand which bore enough nerves that connected to a fountain of freewill, enough so that I should be mature enough not to murder in the family already. It was astounding that there was little to do. Mortality really had its chokehold from people's napes, as much as the population could pretend it was aware that doom spared no one, pretty or otherwise. Laura was smart enough. I supposed she could have it in her to dismantle my brain for her own gain, since her patch had been apathetic as of late- she could have constructed a scenario wherein I figuratively froth out the heart for this beautiful image of a party which I had no business lapping up beforehand, yet when I make my grand appearance at the event it's her and her three friends sitting in a blank room, facing away, poking at a huge, clay modeled Leah figure with a poker as it burned out. I would show up and find my mother decapitated in the porch. I would show up and find out that my father wished for more involvement in my life. Knowing my luck, I would show up to a wake donning a showy apparel I had apparently felt the need for and Laura would turn only to throw me the saddest look. All black would be a fair occasion, no irony entangled. 

But it was near impossible not to make room for some happiness. It would end also, it was entirely possible that it would end without any great affect on my livelihood. I would be sadder after, however it would not have anything to do with melancholy... This was an emotion rarely experienced. Rather, it's experienced by the sad who grew too nostalgic over their recent peak. 

I went to sleep early that night in order to pass the time between the fest and I quicker. Any advantage was one that god had begged me to make use of. Was there any higher meaning? Well, how should I know? Still... It was fun to think about when it seemed that everything aligned in such convenience- though this is the bane of someone else's life, as the laws of the universe delve into. 

Tuesdays were meant to settle well in an empty stomach and heaven knows mine had never been full. The dust was meant to stop its frolicking and stick in place to the cement, yet there was a circuit failure somewhere in the city that zapped across each pole, beam and riveted line, chords twisting towards the apple, then fanning out by the buildings in the estates, baroque but never quite pretty; I was indebted for they had taken this pipe dream to bestow upon me something unfathomable in a paling mind a loser would possess, shopped out beyond a glass display case that didn't catch the condensation inherent to the human breath or air affected in a humanoid mannerism. It could have been a symbol that moved objects further down than I had the self consciousness to examine, and one that told me justly, with closure licking up its jaw, I must, through a hasteworthy three days, become this vision which etched itself all over me but never affected me beneath a positive lense. 

My aunt had visited last Christmas and that had been it for a year- I was starved of her presence, as I'm sure you would have deducted from the way I'd phrased it. 'That had been it for the year' I'd prattled with the hopes that I would not go on to rephrase this by displaying admiration of any kind. The pursuit to unaffectedness continued. Still, I will tell you this: her visit was surprising because she looked different, mostly, and nobody seemed to stand it save for yours truly. She was not an old woman nor an older one but she had disposed some greyness through a chemical imbalance and peroxide, then coated black dye. Black dye often didn't work on those who willed for dark hair as it always seemed to impose itself, as if an unnatural leech collection composed upon the crown, but in her case it shone through with her sinister air(the kind only interesting people may possess) in order to flourish. Her coat was large and peculiarly ornate. The fur was faux, as she'd explained it, and it sat in bunched thickets from her shoulders down to her knees. It had a slit down the middle so one could view her outfit just barely and most tastefully. Framed by the artificial black shadow the white dress she wore was bunched up in a coil belt, a leather kind slashed horizontally to three thick ribbon swatches. I had contemplated making sure it could never leave the premises. My aunt could return to her supposed nightlife and from time to time, her cold 'opting out' in regards to it, yet the coat would have to remain with me. After all, it had never been her that I liked so much.

Well, it's easy to sit and ponder- or in my case, lie and ponder- and that's one thing, but another breed entirely is the execution, whether it be bloody or dotted with good intentions or both. There was nothing I could do then. When it was a somber late, my mother and father both collaborated on creating an awful atmosphere by sleeping in separate rooms, though no worse than how it would be if they were sharing a bed, a pillow, or most unfortunate of all, DNA. They were freighty and woke up when necessary. We hadn't ever bothered to install smoke alarms and thus they arose to any crackle they heard, possibly even each night as a sort of bracket for a restless, lucid sleep known as awakening, yet they conditioned themselves to believe that it was indeed a lucid dream after all. Not that it made much sense to me. Cutting the tail down the middle, I will say that it would be quite impossible to leave the room. There existed this certain entropy which tangled itself up in each family member action or passing and could not be removed. When extracted, it landed back in the same place with some sour residue. 

I passed the night fretting. It was in my nature to do as such: until twelve I was biting my finger nails bloody. I wanted nothing more than to escape. My room was large yet it did nothing but contribute to a false ghostliness my brother had imposed upon me during the 'worthwhile days' wherein he lived across the hall. He'd said that there was nowhere as cold in the house as my room, and he pointedly added that it "didn't necessarily mean the temperature". Oh, woe is me! The bathrobe, beneath sunlight, had a plush grid stitched on its surface, soft to touch, but when the dawn called its name it turned over a new face and grew to the sinister figure I was then watching, hung up from a hook on my wardrobe door and more human than myself, in a way, for however artificial its personality was it still managed to glow. 

Bearing this no longer, I tried to discreetly lean across my spring box mattress and extend out the window hinge. It opened almost a full one hundred and eighty degrees out onto the street and in my worst moments I turned to it with a fairly pitiful face. It was a little comfort; I pushed my head out and watched my hair dismantle and drag across the lip of the frame, then beyond that there was my father's car. When the state trees were in bloom a thin layer of sap swept over car’s metal top. The sun further contributed to the stickiness and leaves would get caught up, forming abstract, sharp images for the trained eye to observe from afar(this being my window since if anyone else had a trained eye in this regard I was thus far unnotified). Right now, or perhaps I should say as of late, it was flickered clean and drenched with the only shine in the garden. There had been these arrays where watering cans once sat in the corner, but they were since eliminated by my mother's orders for decluttering the vicinity- as she put it. My hair bet around in the October wind, this peculiar sort that fulfilled a flight to wingless creatures and objects even when unecessary. There was a strand cutting my nose in half and almost catching on my lower lip's bed. Most houses were solemn in a huge ripple of lifelessness, but to my interest the new family, directly across, had two windows still on air. The first I presumed was the daughter's room as the light filtered through a rosiness. The curtains were drawn, partitioning the assumed bratz shelves away from toms' eyes, the kinds I for now had the night given guts to possess. The next was a different case entirely, due to the fact that the room was laid open to whoever cared enough. Already it reflected that of a teenage boy's, though they had only moved in two days ago and I had yet to see an adult move in an adult like manner across the cobblestone. I hadn't so much as seen a box being carried through the threshold but still I knew that they must be fresh figures on the dusk the day I'd first caught sight of them- just three weeks ago a peculiar couple had shared the place and, to nobody's stroke, had gotten it altered so it more accurately reflected the warzone that it was in theory. They fought on most days; sometimes it would be catfights out on the pathway wherein one would threaten the severing between the hearts, etcetera, but sometimes it got too boring for them and swooped into an era one could come to expect after enough time spent so close to them. They would begin by arguing at the evening, sometimes outside but most often with the porch door just slid open- what made this drama showing possible was the manner in which they spat at each other, as it was so loud it woke distant dogs and pulled them to unhinge a bark buried beneath their general sleep they had been brashed from. Slowly it would rise and climax without any pleasureful trace until one woman- I had never learned their names, but she was the shorter one, the kind who would be stopped frequently by shop assistants who suspected her of lifting due to her stereotypical orange tinged, ever so often ratty haired appearance- extended a hand to seemingly threaten the other one. I had watched once as it happened, almost in awe above my physics book from which I was expected to study. When life presents a natural show without the strings it seems one is obligated to translate it to witness testimony. Thus I focused further. Really, it was all I could do. 

It was at this point I first experienced a horrifying awakening that relapsed slowly into a horrifying experience with life in general. If the liver was the organ which processed alcohol and other such nasty substances, than the one wherein love found its home in much the same way, to me, was forever altered, starved and shut down. Before this ordeal I had envisioned love as a strike first interpreted with kind, hopeful eyes, and it was an affair between two who had unfairly stolen parts of the other and furthermore when it grew to its purest form it was an accumulation; the brain first was affected, then the eyes by withdrawal, an odd look thrown sloppily in a path carved meaningful, a bowing, a distance whether visible or otherwise, an attachment placed in the wrong individual, let's say all these must symbolise the bullish red, then it was propelled back to the brain who hath not the powers in the first place to fulfill any necessary orders, then it dipped into the aforementioned organ and dissolved its lining with strength until it gooped about as if a pink, shadowed meniscus, and then it deteriorated all longing it touched until the desire flamed its sharpest and it could no longer keep a reign on the emotion, which must then be perceived through the physical space; thus the strike. It leaves a redhot trail and perhaps ruins what had once been beautiful but it was unfair. 

At once, upon viewing the girl manipulate her fists to harm the other, I realised that I had been so very wrong this entire time, as it was not with any tender glance or passion or even fury that the pain was received, which was most hurtful even to witness. If violence could not, in most cases, be the manifestation of great conviction in love then what was love to be measured by? It wasn't that I thought it should always be conveyed through this horrible notion but rather it was exclusive to the brightest sparks on the horizon. If love didn't cause these disorders then did it bear a weak capacity? If it was born with this weak capacity, rather than having stripped it or demolished it so discreetly its harbourers hadn't noticed in the first place, then was there a point to much of anything? 

Previously my romantic ideology had been so very harmful it was astounding and I was somewhat glad to be offset from this road I was strolling most unabashed downwards, yet the emptiness I experienced afterwards was of the incomparable sort. It wasn't the initial impression so much as the fallout that reeked in the reeds, steaming away an unforgettable distress through the air. I had been ruined for my own benefit that day. It killed me that I never quite saw the victim outside again- not on the street nor anywhere else. Instead she remained in the house, the walls of which had been transparent as of late; in the glass windows one could see her cleaning all hours of the day. You can tell me how this should fully occur and I would not remark their absence. In their place was that family, the one I perhaps had too many opinions on for someone who had not once interacted with them other than a quick, fork tongued snare lined my direction- for judging no less. I was glad, really, that they had cut the daisies once blooming in their stead and that now I could see the son's bedroom rather than a pale, hollow being sorting through a makeup bag that did not belong to her but was her assigned duty to clean up nonetheless. 

I put my head in my hands as my chin was growing colder by the minute. There was something odd about me in that I seemed to experience all temperature through a magnified extent when compared to other people. It didn't bother me so much, other than when my school staunchly refused to switch on the heating and the teachers' hands were forced to invest in either space heaters(the empathetic option) or coats(the option I would've undergone should I have been in their unfortunate position). The cold was undeniable as it had licked the awful winter air and the awful moon heat and now it was presented to me, awful, glistening. Still I watched the place, this insomniac seventeen year old girl who may as well be referred to as a Nancy, for I was growing and organising a fair few assumptions from the bedroom I'd drawn. The son had various posters all over the place, some shuttered with tape and ruined thusly. I couldn't see that well since it was a fair distance from my eyes but it seemed most were comprised of humanoid figures and my best guess would be photographs. What was odd was that he had the light on but he was not in sight, and he didn't appear to be the type of boy who found the dark troublesome enough to sleep with the light on and for whatever reason, the curtains drawn. Although it was cold, I remained looking for a few unpredictable minutes. Perhaps I was set on seeing him at least one time, thus proving to myself that he did indeed still exist. For all I knew, he had realised the facts about this town and pilled off to New York before the monotony could claim his brain as well as his geographical location. It surely must be a plague which consumed us all. 

After a while(I supposed, though my clockface wasn't lit by natural moonlight so it was anyone's guess really) he finally confronted the conspiracies and presented himself. The door was opened with such smoothness it was as though it glided, and a leg appeared outwards before the figure could follow it. There he was in his tepid pyjama set, gingham, perhaps handed down from some ancestors; I didn't understand why anyone would still choose to wear brown. Nevertheless, it was almost soothing to see him exist in what he perceived as solitude. 

It was all surrounded by this odd, perhaps false phenomenon. It was mildly deceiving almost; I wanted to believe that he was acting under this spontaneous air when he looped his room thrice, searching for something, then having failed to uncover it he drooped onto the mattress and effectively removed from my view. But still I am under the belief that no matter how much we try we are never going to remove ourselves from other humans fulsome, and we will not act upon certain desires even when we perceive a loneliness and an unobserved state as one possessed by us. For all I know, he could've been aware the entire time- and now, wouldn't that be awkward? I couldn't stand to make this placard despise me so soon. More than that, I'd rather an awfulness contain him rather than him find me in any way skewed from humanity's general consensuses. I wanted to remove myself from him and everybody else but the expense was that everything became meaningless- let's say I was separated once and for all, every action I took could not influence another and thus it might as well be sifted through a black bin bag to a hooked phone restful in the cradle. 

Who's to know what I would've done should he have done so much as looked back at me? Would I flush or would I attempt a half witted communication involving some mouthed hellos, goodbyes, all of which would escape his psyche? It was impossible to tell, but the one item that was no longer blinded was that I knew I had to return to bed promptly. My mentals had arrived at a certain drowsiness most insomniacs lusted after and it was more to do with the joined closure of disintegrating into a bed set rather than anything else. I closed over the window, floated back to my pillow. It was completely cool against my head, and my quilt felt so unfamiliar to my body, as if that of a stranger's. I prayed that my dream would not be lucid, as I found it all too easy to let the mirages become a bit scary when the reigns tugged at my hands. 

 

_ CHAPTER FIVE  _

My dream was not lucid after all. It seemed even my subconsciousness did not wish to pull me closer, thus I was left out of the joke when my entire mare was ravaged up by odd, geographical creatures which held the gooder intention over the nicer one. I was eradicated once or twice for little to no reason, but perhaps this was another way my life had been mirrored and framed up for some awful self-dissection. 

I had developed an unhealthiness towards triangles, if that's the depths some paranoia can reach. It was astounding to see them on my bedspread when my eyes ~fluttered~ open, and I was reminded once more just why I had hated my mother's interior decorating chops. See, I do like to feel somewhat generous when it comes to other people, because I would find it all too easy to criticise basically everything about them, from generic things such as noses built to stop flooding in Thailand during water season to noses that most resembled wild mushrooms sprouting up from astroturf, and then people who had eyes either far apart or close together enough that a tie could be placed vertically before them and they'd be concealed fully, blinded much the same; above all else I could feast on a boring person's personality and pick each piece of stale, white meat from their ribs, which I'd then fashion picks from to scrape the remaining 'god, does she drive to sleep' internal comments from between my gums(they would turn red by the time the rest had been disposed of to an acceptable extent and they'd sink into the floorboards like pasty little worms fat and red from a blood bounty) and I could profess in a detention center, when pressed far less than the general public, that nothing seemed to bother me more than those girls on the football team who, bless their souls, believed their father's words- we shall treat him as the collective, reverse-ripening handsomeness pursuing father figure, two feet at either door frame and giving out the whole ten yards about how the referee had been staunchly wrong in regards to his daughter's foul earlier, wherein she left a permanent metal chip in her opponent's chin from a swift kick to the face administered in football boots, and when turned over the soles of said football boots no longer were embedded with six jagged metal studs whereas they'd been embedded with five before- and I would say that the team had a heavy focus laid upon the midfield, in which the two talents were left free barter, but still I could not shake the idea that constant razoring and hair pinning and spray tanning could not account for much at all as only the aerosol from the spray had any hope of altering the football's physics, if indeed it realised a smaug thick enough to throw the other team into visual impairment, and I could also say that many girls in my class lacked half their bite on weekends when the hierarchy was abolished by the own clothes sort and their jeans were the same pair they'd worn yesterday and the day before and along the right thigh there still existed this frothy trace where she'd spilled her matcha green tea at the coffee shop the other day with the girls, heart, so you see, I could really rip them apart if I felt the need, and if I expended three hours before a large parchment and wrote out each minute flaw they possessed I could have the same practical effects upon them as that of a school shooter without, in the eyes of the law, being required to ever wear orange out in an open space. There would be continental suicides; pretty little ones flared with grey, starchy skirts and blue plaid and the reader's fantasy girl's choice of lip colour- whether this is natural or not is left up to you- and there would be these visions brought on by death, stifled by the grandparents first hearing the tragedies from the parents at the dining table. A lot of cold tea would somehow get involved. After death, it seems, no one ever remembers to finish their tea. Above all else, this to me is the biggest waste- it would even so much as ease your brain onto the idea faster than anything else, than therapy or drugs or alcohol or other common hugs- the uniform also was greatly affected by death, in that it looked best when it was paying the girl her final coronation. We were unfortunate in that our unfirom was stiff and unattractive but it had enough blade to strike a specific attractiveness depending on how warped the witness's mind may be. The reason I bring this all up as- as- well... firstly, it sprung up to counteract my dismissal of my mother's interior designs, as I'd referred to it, but then all these ideas had this brief rapture that golded my eyes until I could no longer ignore them. Divine rays spiked outwards from these cold burials and they consumed me so. I woke up feeling as if I would rather die as myself right now rather than die as a schoolgirl deluxe, daydream calling out from all pretty literature in seventy, eighty years, beauty becomes her, these miscellaneous keynotes for all that denotes the beauty again and again, endless loops of gold leaves and the fig that sways with sea air(I scoff, as if they grow by the sea at all) and the shadows that frolic in a pretty girl's hair rather than upon her complacent visage! The surface of the aforementioned visage would be so smooth all imperfection first began getting pulled at by gravity and eventually sloped down that gorgeous, downplayed chin that existed but never to be remarked. It felt justified almost. I had wished for years that my hatred could be justified, and when the dusk infected all lines in my floorboards- laid to rest little splinters of grey light pooling across each- in that very moment I had captured it, my treasured excuse. I could hate because I was oddly subjected to much the same all my life. I was a creature of hatred who possessed the ability to swine from my first moments beneath a persecuting light, and finally it had replaced my muscles with absorbent little pockets of meanness unassumed by anyone who had ever been in close contact with me. 

What was it they'd said about me back then? That I 'looked weird', that I was quick to bite my tongue? Well, I tell you now, if I still had it working along my words I would beat them to the ground with this spitted truth! They would go to bed and experience, for perhaps the first or second time ever, what it felt to drift to sleep upon a wave of insecurity. To those of us who believed it all meant something, vengeance is not so wrong all the time. Only its bad reviews are written by the victims who can still smell that fresh blood in their noses or below them or surrounding them. I had never felt so ravenous yet so settled in my own skin before, and it was terrifying at first that such pointed concepts suited me as that ornate faux fur I still, in miniscule amounts, allowed to plague me, but like a long, black veil it rested behind me and I knew that I would no longer have to leave my shadow up to anyone's interpretation anymore. Obnoxious as I was, at least I knew for a fact that I could never be wrong about anything at all. And this was what brought me to the school gates that day, moreso than any other "contribution", or so they say, as my seventeen years now proclaim all this truancy talk a sham. 

I would not hurt them, but I would think about it. More than likely I'd confront it on Friday when my system was bogged down with the courtesy alcohol and an ear was close to my mouth, a head of hair I could pull towards me and dispose upon all my self doubt that I was now too sensible to possess. It was a rush like no other- but still, the comedown didn't loom with any grace. The blotch on the stained glass fed into my dread that I still pushed backwards until I was 

slipping through the day. I could not be forced into a conscious, stagnant state after all. 

My mind wasn’t elsewhere, as I was very  much sure it had been beheaded with my wit and my likeable aspects moments ago. The silver lining lay in that for the first time ever, it seemed, my loneliness could pass me by unremarked, as I was far too concerned with all the matters and new stains a gushing of blood from a sever mark would thrust upon myself. But the party, oh the party, this beautiful, golden beer gelled lifeline that mystified me so! When the house’s infrastructure was begging for mercy I’d be laid out on a stretcher, drunk as I were, and there would either be someone I could throw darts at tailing the giant white starch or I’d be left to the paramedics with their red crosses catching the street lights, marking the cell collection that didn’t realise I was to annoy them entirely by the time they went home for tea and awful television. It may be that I’m uncultured but all these party references beyond those which descended from teen dramas had alluded me my whole life. I had no idea what to expect other than a dozen or so cases of alcohol poisoning, poorly timed house wreckages and all the solicitations one might undergo before harpooning a thing to bump against their lower regions for the night, and the boys would travel the place in this wolfish manners while the girls flimsier about, flamboyance dripping from the odd elbow or leg or nail, and smiling they would sway like this for what would be remembered as a lifetime. Red cups found their common place in the concept and poor decisions received much the same treatment. Perhaps it isn’t so apparent, yet all this did nothing but further enthrall me and vigour out my dopamines. I tried not to waste them all on a Wednesday but it was difficult- we had a double history class in which it seemed my only prayer I could turn to to make it through without stabbing into my veins with a ballpoint pen seemed to be theorising about the night. Inwardly it carried this sweet meat smell, fat dripping from a spatula, and outwardly a buzz arose over the class when anyone mentioned it- though it was sad that any one of them had been invited besides Laura and I, I supposed it would do to be included for once.    
Our teacher was what most immatures would call a “hag”. It wasn’t that she had death’s door over for dinner in her beloved angles, but rather she brushed everyone the wrong way; so much so that it was a matter of philosophy, and of whether or not wrongness existed when rightness couldn’t appear blank against it. Her hair was withering and it forked down over what would soon be diminished from the shoulders status, diagonal astrays around its company as though it were the thinning branches from a sick willow tree. For this class we weren’t allowed to move anything more than our hands as, allegedly, it was quite difficult to digest history when a full  span was not gifted in name towards it. I would not put it past her to expect handwritten consent ransoms each morning, signing away our rights to clamp our ears through some legal jargon lense. I wanted little to do with her. Of course I wanted little to do with her, but she was a teacher appointed to me, therefore it was within jurisdiction that she should rain tyranny and siege over my enthusiasm for all things living. Still, I had to lend some attention or else what would line my pearly gates would be various wave offs from my coworkers at some fast food joint(the stereotype of course being McDonald’s, though above all else this is left up to interpretation as it is the most pointless addition to the tale). With deceit she told us that the next chapter was quite interesting, according to her and her ‘PhD colleagues’ who she spoke of almost relentlessly, leading to some cut gossip about how she’d originated from a rich, neglectful household and was raised as a ragdoll until she was too perfect to live with undiagnosed schizophrenia, and from then on she began to exhibit the symptoms which pertained, among other things, forever talking about people who existed in a ward of reasonable doubt. They were contained to her highest praises but no one had ever gone on record to say they’d heard her invent a name or even mention one. This, when viewed in a collective assembly along with her odd fake “gumshield” gums, rippling pink with veins shrouded like strands of hair fallen from that tumultuous willow, it was clear to see why others viewed her as an inherent sort of liar. In any case, it wasn’t within the admittedly stifling walls of my character that I should place any stock in other people’s traits. Although this may seem a bit controversial to state, since for our combined wasting along the red line with our life span’s I’ve yet to show myself as unaffected in your company. So you see, my mind  wandered  to all these fish I’d mentioned before- silver scales for our silverest eyes, slivers and dices of light white gut that decomposed into little fibers one would find on a high grade- or passable- sofa, among the display case, shopped around through the sea, the reefs and the ongoing heat waves set forth by the seaweed, dry though it appeared quite damp. There were these fish that weaved about through the pollution and they never accessed sleep through motionless reasoning. Instead, a bubble plucked them from their lives and their eyes existed as pretty glistens for the passing nurse shark should she turn her head. They were mindless, careless and possibly reckless beings that thrived only upon their tamed survival. What it would mean to prance about this shoeless zone trapped through the non-air poisonous-with-glamoured-blue-as-though-it-were-gold air, it was so special to me I could write dissertation over dissertation over dissertation over sleepless night over dissertation about it. 

Reel it in, Leah. Enough idling about fish again. I caught the hook between my foremost fingers- the two I, and many other girls, used to hack out a plea down there. It turned out to be lunch, as if my luck could ever run clearer with the water. I knew then that it was lunch because, so it goes, there was a spindly, limb esque shadow forming across an image of King Louis the painting upon my history book and I was reminded that my head did indeed function on the y axis. I looked up to see my ongoing, dreadful pleasure in life, and Laura cocked her head back at me with that mannerism most springheaded electic cuckoo clock bearing females had worked into them from early childhood. She had this half smile that scared me for some reason, perhaps seeing as I’d never learned to fully unleash one upon an individual myself, nor would I muster up the strength in the foreseeable future- it was quite the risk to don. Many things could dock south due to its muscles: the array consisting of- in no particular order- the accidental frown, the accidental squint that could be perceived as a temporary lazy eye, the unattractive, accidental rolling up which the cheek undergoes, and the mouth itself becoming but a line with no blood underlined lips. I was quite delighted to see her, however preceded this was with my coldblooded fear. It was moreso the aspect that she could say, “oh, party’s cancelled,” like it was a component found in the air around us and nothing more. She would return home to her dusk ridden household where everyone’s eyes turned away from each other on instinct. Her duvet was the warm part of her room, though once it had been her mind brimming with the Laura like enthusiasm people wished to attain from her. Even I would flock to her with my net out, all wishy washy through the wind. But her glow always distorted through the net grating. This was why I submerged a lifeless body in the mud. I had no weight to me, and in terms of the actual realised facts our worlds were all rampant with, my figure had enough to stock away some life and bones. Yet I felt a bit enthralled by this, voice from my lungs factioned away by its eternal swearing! I would one day be able to wear the faux fur as though it was an ostrich adorned pipe scarf, both of which would not boil away their glamour in reaction to my gorgeous sloping. 

“Hey,” she said when it became apparent that we had both noticed each other well enough. Still, I supposed I was meant to mention her nails before she mentioned her well mannered greeting; this was why her hand had adorned my book with its five beautiful navy gels slotted onto each fingertip. They reduced into white lines on their centers from the window’s reflection. Today was the best dressed day of the week, as no longer was there a depressive carpetted greyness over the skyline. Instead the roofs twisted over and were exposed to leisured cold warmth. Her eyes had little brown fishbowl flakes surrounding the pupil and I’d never seen them before, but I was sure they must’ve been in place all along for me to catch them, off guard, in that moment. She did her hair differently in a move deemed strategic by most other girls I could read; they thought she did it for others, or more ridden with detail, guys in our class, though not many were the apple of anyone’s eye at all so jealousy wasn’t the thing most in order I’d encountered with that passing thought. “Wanna get lunch together? It’s been a while.”

“Ah, so it has,” I said, as if I hadn’t considered it every week day since a splinter had been driven through our friendship last April. The thing was that I did not seem to gain any charitability, amiability or drive to better myself through eating lunch as a solitary figure on the hill lawn when the bell rang all Pavlovian. My skirt had hardened a bit from so much dew weaving itself between the skirt threads as I never wanted to sully my coat with grass stains and thus I’d sit bare on the green. Sometimes the boys would wander from the back door gate where the bike shed loomed out of reach for the robbers, and they would behold me with some disgust- why is she alone when it is perfectly within reason for someone to grow not quite so alone as before?- and following that sometimes they'd act sly, so far from order that order had invited their mistress over to rectify the hate sex. They said, voices callous as they always were, that I was a slag of some sort. The joke wasn't on them, but might I mention that I was a holy virgin regardless? Mary had born the lord Jesus Christ before I'd kissed anyone with any meaning whatsoever. If one wanted to go far with these comparisons, you could also say that I hadn't ran from my hometown to travel with a boy to a suitable hotel just yet, though it was on a list for when someone liked me enough to try their hand with me. I've said before that it is all about the fashionable nightlife with me, the straying from buildings which incite any visions of homeliness upon the subject, but still remaining so close to the city that some light may beam and waver down to a girl on a corner and fully immerse her outfit with all the capability to strike someone with adoring ideas and withheld words. I would not leave the city enough so that every facet of my gown could be plagued with shade, unless I were staying in a country manor where I could unleash that other Leah who believed in classical music and classical dance and classical clothes crackling by a fire and the jaw dropping actions a man and a woman sometimes held against each other on those kings beds that were never allowed to be quite so unruly as they were up in the hills and vales, where anyone could drive past but no one could voyeur their way through a large window that faced the one way. I wanted action and I wanted it soon, but it would not do for it to be brutifish and in vain of this picturesque livelihood I'd crafted- this was why I hadn't tried my luck with any dogfaced boys in my class just yet. Also, they petrified me, though I assure you this is quite besides the point. There was James with the imported Chelsea backpack and the shaving marks somehow on his scalp and the long, girlish eyelashes I wanted to pluck to the u's, and there was Alex that would traverse entire plains and entire spaces and so on and so forth to be viewed in the same grace and fondness that James was viewed with. However, this was often restrained from him as he was nowhere near as bright or as attractive; a fact which the girls I'd spoken to about it agreed on. Those two were the notable fiends who manifested in my perilous solitary  lunchtimes with pest-like maneuvers. They were often spotted together outside of school too, which was the information that most naysayers dismissed when hearing about other people's lives. There were the pessimists that all agreed that it was fairly impossible to maintain a healthy relationship with who they viewed, through other people's retina's somehow, so it seemed, as 'school friends'. Well I tell you now that I know too little about friends to make the separation, or else I would perhaps be swayed towards cardiac arrest. I had friends that had never gone to my school in my life but they were so distant now I could easily be led to believe they were all a vague fever dream brought on by my younger self. I was an imaginative kid, always wandering through my consciousness rather than concentrating my abilities on the basis of what was expected from me, and I didn't gain most praise from my teachers when they were handing it out, and in this large preschool academic blitz my mother hadn't a leg to stand on when it came to boasting about me with any honesty whatsoever. Still, I commended a joy in words that most students escaped with their general coolness. I read quite a lot- pages that evaded my current state and memory and estate, certainly- and I enjoyed so much less about the television than my brother who came before me. He had a video games console hooked up to it and would waste away many daylight hours rummaging through the other, inferior worlds(when I viewed them, since I found such an unassumed beauty in what could be interpreted as such: if it was all up to me to envision the author’s scenario I could perfect it in all levels of taste, throw it through the metal canister tumbler and extract it polished). He did this so much that at one point, he developed an acute carpal tunnel syndrome that would escape the common surgeon though their incisions were regarded upon a higher plane. A scalpel never found its custody within his grip but still it was left with much the same pain, clamping up at times when he dipped a teaspoon into the pig shaped gravy pot at special communal, familial dinners and the tendons would leech over a paleness unbeknownst to the rare sentient snow. I adored him at my footings, when I began teething against chair ledges and obedient cats that remained still as though they were petrified and the wooden knobs attached to most chest drawers, opening into layers of clothing fibrosa. It was a simpler time; my brother could access the parts of the brain one used to love family members, and it was presented to me for my fifth birthday when I was given my first book and I looked up to see how my mother’s doting extended beyond the actions, the eyes and the gestures, extending outwards a gold frizz halo about her face. But he understood me more than most people and thus he foresaw that awful shift within I was undergoing as just a preteen, still he left me here in place where I now must sit and think until he comes back to deal with the parents. He was always more charismatic with them than I, and more notably, forever willing to pass through all the hoops they presented, play the game to rewire its internal biology. 

I wasn’t bright enough for any of this. The closest I came was when I took it upon myself to become my mother’s housewife and personal stylist. Even then, I was inadequate. “Where do you usually eat?”

It was quite tragic that I didn’t know. She was wearing a new scrunchie that day- I hadn't seen it before but the plaid had already worn thin as a trend through my blues. This particular breed was caught up through the tides where rosiness surfaced and the white squares contained some odd, grounding cream, and when she once more cocked her head to judge me it floundered about below her ponytail, of which only curls had sat at a permanent unrest. I supposed then that I must be a special fond only pictured in black and white to view something I hated so much as gingham as some comparative, vast ocean. Lightly, there had been some rock pools, black when the rock was moreso involved than the pool, thick as oil upon a canvas and with the same little chunks. I wanted to get caught up with it all some more. Life owed me as much, I thought- this was why I rose and looked at her and in passing considered a general dream I had that latched to her with this gorgeous, flattering lighting. One day, one day, I wouldn't mind it if it were to be her lips that must greet mine wordlessly. Between us some air would not be captured but rather smothered and our noses would form two arches through negative space. I didn't want this so, but I did perhaps will a little bit for its image. Satan was impressed with me right now then, hands upon an eject button which centered up a beam through a cosmosis. Within this glass beam- reflecting some aurora along my slimness, as you can imagine- would be myself at once being present in a space and then gone and then present and then gone for full thickets, distances, until I arrived at wherever it was that mindful sinners went to waste other people's time rather than their own. I got a kick out of this idea. If I really, really felt courage brush up my spinal chords I could very well have leaned over and captured her into this huge metaphor. I'd have her captivated and it would be one of the first times that someone could've done so; the first time I'd ever done so too, no doubt. Yet instead I listened to hear her again, there as she was, peg legs pulling her away to the door. Sniffing didn't catch the wave of burned hair that tinged about the brunettes she allegedly went with, though I was sure this wouldn't be the case for long. I didn't mind if they were there, for I hadn't given them a chance before, nor had they been in the appropriate and antithesis condescending situation where they could extend it back out to me. I felt that if given some restraint on our personal freedom we could get along just fine. If, say, we were confined to a room that didn't know a door, to an extent which made one question how they had ended up between four walls in the first place, without much choice in regards to our passing of time, we could have our collective vocal boxes forced into conversation. I didn't know a thing about what was uniform to comment on. I would not know head or hair(there was so much to go around, enough brown locks between those three to feed a malnourished cat who wasn't used to edible things being thrust its way for at least a week- if they donated it it would be quite excessive and the plastic bags it would all be contained within would burst a bit, airtight as they were) when it came to what passed as general conversation, but my brother believed, thusly trusting me to believe that all good conversation with "these types" began with an admonition. They would never sit so well with the wine and dine without that glimmer sparked through scarlet lips- or ruby lips, depending on the man describing the events- and immaculate orthodontic care, from which controversy took flame. I assumed there would be many handbags and many boyish charms dispersed between them. One would gracefully pluck her retro snakeskin clutch from beside her white toed patent heels and would go on to explore, in detail, the night hours she'd messed away with this boy who had once courted her very sister not so long ago. Another would reminiscence from the comments her formed one night stand had made about her valentino blue. What would really be priceless would, if possible, be the factor of an Alexander McQueen officianted bag among us all. I had never held one but I'd seen one before, stowed away by my aunt on her easter visit just last year; she'd ordered in a stepladder with a tactful, respectable form and had used it to place the bag upon the ornate cabinet my mother for some reason insisted on giving any of the room's light to. I believe this now to be a conscious plea against me so that I wouldn't grow so tempted as to remove it from her possessions; or worse, my jealousy would leak into pits that had been reserved for other soppier feelings and I would mar it up with a black kohl pencil and some fingertips that functioned their best beneath a fair knitting of spite. This was my aunt who had kept the bag, and still I hadn't taken it, but if it were in the brunette's house, any one of them, I was surer than I'd perhaps ever been before that I would not falter before slipping it under my coat and leaving the house with my arm across my bunched torso. Fashion would be a lifeline to me if only my money allowed me to utilise it as such. For now, it was an inaccessible boundary lined with horrific reminders that I would likely continue to be unemployed for the close future and maybe even the distant future. I had no curriculum vitae to lather beneath other school work queries at the Christmas dinner, and none that only seemed to show up when my interviews had gone their most awry. Even in this regard had I failed. 

Something gnawed at the door in the same fashion that I'd gnawed years before, back when less foresight had sentenced me to lifetime pessimism. There was this desire at war within me to explain to Laura why I was the way I was, and why this should make her feel a bit empathetic for more- all this implying that I am to be pitied, which I know, as much as you do, is true. We went out to a picnic table, although it was cold enough that a fork in the air would contract so hard it split down the middle, scattering aluminum shards one could view only their closest eyes in about what would soon set as snow. The brunettes weren't there; at first I was delighted, but I quickly came to the conclusion that it was moreso an effect of their being sick rather than my being present with Laura which was distressing. Previously I hadn't seen them all day, though us four took the same torturous french class and spent the time attempting to make verbs anything above temporarily digestible to the short term memory. Laura put one leg up on the bench she was occupying so that her skirt almost dipped up her entire thigh, this oddly shaped, skinny cylinder that one could look at and perceive as "all bone", though I knew it was never intentional when it came to her- or perhaps I only hoped so. I didn’t much enjoy paleness on others, but then again I didn’t much enjoy anything at all. For Laura it would have to do, although at times when the Winter brought upon us its casketed blunt force trauma gallows she showed up quite ghostly against even snow. Or maybe it was last year’s snow that had highlighted it in her, as the light went home early and darkness came to sit its detention with us, her gloves giving the impression that her hands had been amputated in place of an absence. It was cold today but still we wore our skirts. I fished at the inner lining through the tartan and made attempts to rectify its senseless, damp texture as it stuck to my thighs through today’s mist. It was navy like portrayed nights and opaque like vague plastic and I was sure I’d never hated a garment more. Perhaps It would never be dethroned for my least favourite aspect of a school day ever again, when one did not take the inclusitory roles and VSware for other people into play. I was under the impression that there existed a point to all this when we had resurfaced out on the plains; I was not sure why this belief built a hope as much as it did, but I had committed little to shake its claws from my shoulders. All she did was sit and remove from her bag a smaller, drawstring bag constructed from the same goopy pink material with little geometric eclipsed moons on it. She was the kind of girl who possessed the will and the means to do things like this- her scrunchies were all patterned and never threadbare, her shoes for the most part matched her socks down to a colour grading system. Her daddy(she never said this, but it would be a disservice not to bring up her valley girl sona that one would expect from someone of her stature and social standing) worked at a bank though she failed to mention whether he was an executive or someone who chewed green from pork rinds dispersed along the plexiglass. He perhaps didn't create, nor were his hands the blanket margin size one required to hold the power in money he apparently did. I had never once seen her mother, yet after the grey imbalance we'd learned about this past week I doubted she'd do much more than sift through her duvets for the remaining, plastic wrapped eclair for the next few weeks. Maybe she'd stop and think about cutting her hair sometimes so it would not have to replicate a shag carpet, but I hadn't a sense of her character nor her ideals thus far so this was mostly just projecting, I suspected. 

Laura was so quiet that I expected a spirit was picking dried blood from between her hairs- one circumstantial being veiled from those who could for the most part continue the week as necessary if pressed to do so. I feared she would begin to talk about her sister, in which I hadn't known more than a currently angelic, prematurely bovine face, but also I was enraptured with this prospect of some solid or even deranged proof that she placed some trust in me. To talk about the darker threads that hung from each of us was to invite wariness as if it was so familiar it always left a deluxe soap box upon the kitchen table before it seated itself, cardigan falling over its chair back. I had yet to do this with her, if another were to discount my claims that the first dead sister "conversation" had been one. I would be too embarrassed to initiate this idea of course, and it would never be rounded up by approval. 

She was quiet again and again, never ending but seeming to start with that glimmer which tells a human girl that they are about to suffer in ignorance. Her legs seemed to grow longer from their extension but it stood out verily that it was a trick of the high-low light. Inappropriately in a few ways, I wanted to defile her. “I lost my sister this week,” she said, “but nothing changed. Isn’t that kinda funny?”

“I don’t really see the humour in it to be honest,” I said, feeling this unjustified, slight guilt overcome me. 

“It’s all the same- my parents work, I study, and my sister’s room is just as cold. Even if I don’t see her for a split second before I leave for school it’s all the same. All the same, all the time, all the same, all the same, like it’s no worse than it was before, and it’s all the same.”

“I’m sorry,” I shifted along the bench so I was now more than a fingertip away from her back, though I hoped my discomfort wouldn’t colour the liquid any darker than it already was. I wasn’t one to comment on death, so it goes; the only way I could experience that blue tongued pain were to be if I was extricated from this hemisphere and then allowed, by the hooves, to dwell upon the ordeal and how it made a collective from all the vitality on this earth and tarnished it while still remaining the most important thing itself, with nothing exceeding it in this category. Still I made my attempts to navigate the minefield, and more recklessly I willed for some mouth to open itself to my latch, and thus I could within it place all words I lacked the motivation to commit to fully. With my new physical space I turned my head so my hair flew back and collided with my shadow. The football pitch was sunk deep in a half cut grave and the paint ruminated away with the yearly frost until there was only the faint semi circles and lines in white. Along the grass there were boys I knew, perhaps, but if I knew them it was only because they were vapid creatures that took more than they gave while giving what would sit eternally. When they reached a certain age they fled from the nest and left the remainders- naive ones who were struck by the knees for narcissism in quite the hypocritical fashion- out with half punctured footballs and slacks caught up with mud imprints to boast before a designer. Sometimes, when they were feeling a certain drama sweep them up through the golden brown waves, they even brought their studded rugby boots in little plastic bags their mother's probably retired the shopping from every saturday morning after they helped unload the jeep. I had never been fond of these kinds, what with the columnous necks and the horrible bedhead and the general social suicide that would not take effect on their half baked lives, upon which frosting was still, for whatever reason, dashed. Laura's ex boyfriend had been quite disparate in the lot and he'd allegedly spent quite some time geckoing others for lack of anything better to do; his name was Jacob and he owned more jackets than anyone else Laura had ever known, as she'd said. At that time it had stung that I'd only gotten one or two. They were both delirious purchases bought in vulnerable moments- when one excludes, as I am so willing to, the addition of my school coat in all its plasto fabric wonder, we are left with a raincoat that consisted, quite plainly, of white with pink zips. It wasn't one that wanted to hold hands with my personality at all, and it quote unquote "wasn't me". For the record, it had been on reduced price down to about nothing from the night market I'd attended the eights away with my brother at the time(I say this with all scalding degrees that ripple along a bitter person's esteem). It was suffocating under some cardigans which were for the most part marketed towards the older crowd- there was one that night, one or two wandering about the stalls with their umbrellas to protect themselves not just from the rain but also the sun, cold, etc, and hail should it grab its knife before they could pull out a concealed rifle. I had spoken with an older lady who had approached me in what I assumed was jest. She wanted to know whyever I was searching for a coat in a 'place like this', as she had deemed it with her red lipstick not coating each shred upon her lips fulsome, though this detail was only revealed when she engaged in a self indulgent smile at my expense. I told her that it wasn't cardigans I saw boys wearing in my dreams, nor girls- though she believed this quite verily to mean that I wished to be these girls rather than uphold them in a high, loving esteem. It was true that I would be all I liked if I could, but wasn't this true of everyone just the same? Unless morality is not a suitor who beams to you when passing by on the pavement while it crackles with rain, perhaps a fitting snow. It would not lace up in white suits and call your name as though it had never tasted another syllable along its tongue before that moment. It was distant, or even on good terms but moreso due to circumstance- knowing each other too well from word of mouth, courted friends and the like. She was an old lady that still possessed some goodness to her, and her heart hadn't been fully blotted by the people in her life just yet: at the end of the day all we do is take from one another, but for a brief moment beneath that electrical wire she convinced me otherwise.It was hard to maintain a balance and though I speak about it as if I know, I'm sure you're aware that that's not the case when it comes to Leah, ignorant as I am when I rest my head against yours with all this hedonism buzzing about the air. Get yourself something nicer, she'd said, because when you look like me, and you will- make no mistake- people will try their hardest to give their unwanted possessions to you. Just the past week my nephews and nieces visited and left me all these regifted bath bombs but my arthritis means I can't use them, and then they give me cardigans every christmas and I'm meant to appreciate it. When you're young make sure to take advantage of it. Be selfish. Make your boyfriend buy you a nice coat. Could it be the cold?

It was true that I hadn't been wearing my own coat at that point, but rather my brother's school one he'd refashioned into a flimsy, wearable rebellion punctuated by several Starfox badges.  I was dismayed by this, of course, since any other fifteen year old girl in my class would be and I ashamedly bowed my heads towards their interpretations as if they were my own- I would have been quite satisfied to wear such a retrograde idea but I was then pink in the face, the rose lenses slipped between my flesh until they molded and compressed against my cartilage, between it along some rifts. She slipped a fiver into my front pocket and thinned out to the crowded pavement before I could make amends and claim, for the love of god, that it was not my money to use! And thus it would be "worthless" to me, entering into a contest wherein blatance is displayed. That was also the piteous moment unwarranted niceness was first reserved in my name; I smiled for a while after, riding along with this vague, considerate motion when it was still open to me. I understood briefly that this was the kind of person I should hope to be- it wasn't often enough that anyone did much about other people, I felt, however this was still quite hypocritical to comment on when it came to me. 

There was a fiver credited to my personhood then, since I'd dissolved a prettiness on the churro stand throughout the sifting cold air. Yet the Starfox coat I had been wearing with my chin pinned up towards eye level now burned hot against my skin and I no longer saw the gentleness I'd once felt when the lattice work caught me in a daze.

The second coat was a camel one I had little need to discuss for the gears to be in order, as it betrayed no ideals from my spread frames and certainly carried about no drop of my Leah esque inhibitions and Jaqueline esque ambitions. The simple story was that it was sewn on a January and left on a bus in late August, in which I'd attended a seat by the backboard as it rumbled out black petrol. I had grown a hatred for my aforementioned pink zipper and went through a disgraceful phase of viewing much about nothing as 'immature', and then it was casting an unwavering, sometimes blue shadow against my bedroom floor and its tan form cut a square out from the fiberwood. Now, I am here and I am quite cold. Though I had picked from a Kit Kat some sparse sustainable nutrients I was still close to dropping dead on the grass(what a sore familiarity that'd grab Laura with, that one) seeing as I'd gone against all lust and skipped my chipper grease this morning. It was the lard that kept my body inflated, I felt, not just with an invisible obesity that weighed me down nonetheless. It allowed room in my veins for blood and a sift in my heart to remove the insatiable quality. Chips were not, thankfully, a commodity that held some power over me, just perhaps my ongoing ability to continue with various activities- for instance, as I sat there a cold went over me. At first one can view this natural reaction to a winter day and grow all the more cautious about the expressed need for pity, but when extracted out from the bone it was obvious it was moreso about my weight. I was raised slender, but soon it had contained itself far too well for my liking until my legs became unpronounced in silhouettes. There they would be, arranging a triangle between my two shins that ended at the bands, two brittle forms of running paint that had ran far too long overdue on the stomach lining and the large teeth. I remained seated though I wanted to flee to a vending machine at the earliest possible opportunity. There was something about Kit Kats in particular I found homely and wished to enjoy in dumb amounts, and the chocolate pasted against the wafer unleashed this almost sexual desire between each portioned rib I had. My eyes followed Laura’s to the woodrow, behind which a lick of hair made its appearance, beating against the wind. It was only the one thing- the bleach, the floundering lines made abstract by virtue of being dismembered from a human or a humanoid, but we both knew in that moment exactly who it was. 

Well, possibly not who it was, but who they accompanied. Laura’s ex boyfriend still refrained from reserving his tongue to talking during the school day and instead it often slopped out from his mouth, into other girls’ mouths, while lunch whittled away. How pathetic, I thought! However, I fully knew that if I had the boyish power over my fellow girls I’d harness it just the same. 

It always seemed to greatly inconvenience Laura when he went at it. Not a silence was ever filled with this, at mercy, but we all were distantly aware that her stress induced bald patch from their heartbreak still hadn’t been covered again with blonde, even in minimal amounts. Seeing as he was her “first love”(this, I doubted was reciprocated) she had never recovered and would not until she no longer was required to account for the fact that he went to her school. We were both holding out for something, but I wasn’t sure what, nor was I sure if Laura knew either. She coughed and cruxed her knees together. 

“I wish he’d stop… tempting me, for lack of a better term,” she said, though I knew she was right on the money with this whole ‘tempting’ business since he was quite the well built, smarmy specimen. Not that I in particular threw much controlled caution to the wind when his presence descended upon me, harps flaring about all directions. He wasn’t my person, so you see- Laura was more deserving when it came to this accolade. I wanted to brand her with a stamp of my name right down the spine; I never wanted to be her so much. Maybe this is a surprise for you, but if surprise is to occur and this is the beginning then it should be a frequent road cut into green fire where we move. These two lines extend right down to the horizon and they don’t move from view no matter how much your eyelids conceal over. They may as well be glassy at this point. I let myself look at the state she was in, survey it a bit openly. The way her mouth was rimmed with these unflattering ‘u’ shadows and creases, her lips drawn away by elongation, I knew she would be upset for nights to come, and not entirely due to some coldness making its way through her heart which I supposed contained a thermometer. She would stay up and cry some more, and there I’d be spying on the neighbour boy again; I feel it is far more appropriate to say ‘for lack of a better term’ in this case. I was no prude but that tempting admittance putrefied me in slight amounts. My groin barely knew a hand let alone any other slender forms of pleasure. “From now on I’m only gonna date ugly people, because at least then it’ll be a good riddance when they fuck up my life. I still think about him when I-”

“Laura, it’s been at least four months and all you talk about is your wanking schedule. For the love of god be more considerate to those of us who are sex repulsed,” I said, however I wasn’t particularly in a huff when it came to her angles and short nails, etcetera. It was moreso this awful grating that clammed up my ears and possessed my eyes to wince. There I was still wincing though the conversation hit that conclusory note with jest, as she seemed quite amused by my uncomfortable self. I tell you now that the feeling was pointedly not mutual. It astounded me that so much had been dreamt and yet lunch was not called off- there were entire minutes remaining before the boys would flock towards the doors and slam them onto each other’s socked feet. Then they would change into their horribly monotonous sneakers with the white laces exchanged for black, zip tongued cotton ones which prevailed all logical reason(whyever someone would place such importance into laces enough to change them was beyond me, and I knew my aunt made sure her buckles were a true plated silver long before purchase regardless). Class beckoned in this worrisome mind state that often overstayed its welcome. I had some serious reparations to consider, for the most part extended towards what I was to do about this torturous Friday night that, despite my common sense, now reeked about the office proclaiming its own slating. So this was what it meant to drown. Overwhelmed, I pulled my school bag over and unzipped it, though I did not need to and afterwards had no idea what my designs were on its contents. Within there sat the stale copybooks- when I say stale, I mean that tea was spilled over the pages and that had staled to a starchy muddened state I simply could not make amends to- I had needed for the previous classes. Thus far, I had yet to switch them for what I actually required after the bell rang. I knew Laura would not go with me however, and that she’d return to her class and her brunette friends as if nothing was astray. But the thing was that whoever came in close contact with I, this Leah girl, was most certainly set astray in one way or another and this was the only time I’d admit something so weighty before an amphitheater. I was quite strange and working to reverse these onset ripples from childhood, but still my presence was enough to shift a mild cell in someone’s neurology so the uncanny could settle fully. This was my day which the isolation would plague once more. Tonight I knew the guilt would be priceless, almost suicidal, and my dressing gown would not fit verily over the great mound of inconsiderate, jaunty fat I had become. I needed a hand mirror and I needed it quick. 

So there we loomed until art, the two solitary staples of a loneliness somehow furthered by the company of others, these pale little things known as our legs lacking dimension- there we loomed staring the dread back in the face while its brow seizured just so. It wanted nothing to do with us and had no room for error, which we contained through the spades and all the way up the penthouse until the diamonds lolled about the floor. She had caught the uncatchable tempo of harm the human livelihood brings upon everyone through loss, and for me it was an effect of that one segregated scratch and sniff in my brain. I could die right there and look better than I’d ever looked before. After all, the silence cleared its schedule for it. 

Off the ledge I went back to class. 

  
  
  
  


_ CHAPTER SIX  _

It had been one table occupation, but already a dawn was emerging from the rickets and Laura had no idea what to do about it. I didn’t blame her for this as it was quite impossible to do so; when one comes so close to it that the oil strokes leap, becoming all the more apparent that it was all due to my standing(or lack of it) on the social regime- no, more than that, I was very odd in a way that no one had anticipated of me. This was all that I chose to let out, thus you can see how very hopeless it was. Nobody seemed to be aware that I held fish in such a fond light or that I styled my mother as though she wished to become brown-bag constructed wallpaper or that just last night I’d stood with my head bowed out the window and watched that boy, hopeless as he was, pace his room thrice before laying to rest. Offscreen he could be within various states and one of such was death. Another was shock, though I doubted these two due to the blood that had ran on Sunday night. It’s not like us to pick off in such close proximity, and running our stream cold after another stream had ran cold not too long ago wasn’t the nicest, most selfless gesture. In any case, he was perhaps alive but not currently being observed by myself.   
The dawn I had brought up was maroon in nature, on the seins of clashing with some rampant depression, and it affected me with flight and unfathomable beauty: for Laura was slumping down to gradual exclusion by our peers. What had been a consequential lunch was now consequential along quite a different spectrum, as the disarray I’d given her now caused her to fumble through daily conversation with her friends who thought her ‘unwell’. Viewing this I felt it was only a matter of time before she sat with me every time very much against her will. 

Heed not; this party was approaching like so! And there it was that I would cement myself by her rosary, through what I believed would be a dimly cast light and murmurs and gossip sticky against plastic cup rims. I would perhaps even hug her before she left me for what she didn’t yet perceive as dead- after awhile, she sadly was required to know more in regards to my condition. 

Mildly put off yet mildly anticipated I went the same way I’d gone home yesterday, pondered the ideals of another nightmarket where it had once stood just the same. There my identity ravaged the environment but remained exclusive to me. It was the mistiest day so far and the seagulls had flew in from sea, which I could only imagine was dusted with storms up and down the surface. They sat on the telephone wires that stripped across the building tops- at one point the cable was covered with this bendy plastic material but now it lay, completely unopened. I also liked seagulls. They were kind creatures when one stood and thought about it with extense, fervour: they enjoyed food and standing and they had no personalities to speak of, thus they didn’t speak, thus they weren’t unhappy. That was all there was to them and I was so envious, I tell you. It was an ugliness I desired and could see myself, in another life, having achieved, but one so far from me now it was slightly worth crying over. 

The shops in these suburbs were for the most part uneventful, and within them there was a dead chill among the air. There had once been record shops but they were now the kind of places that sold huge flat screens people were too frightened by to transport publicly, and the charity shops were innumerable but not one had any fashion to it. My mother had told me the census results this July- as if they were of interest to me- when my father was out and we ate takeaway we couldn’t afford together, and allegedly there were so many old people rotting about the place it was ‘fairly baffling, if only your brother still lived here when we got the survey papers’. I chewed away at the duck fat but refrained for commenting since it was of no interest to me. However, now that I was rummaging through chests of horrific cowboy belts in a cancer research front I felt uneasy by the expiration date. One day it would all tank down until only the overly young remained. As bothering as this seemed, it was the fleeting melancholy towards the evening. The belt buckles were all anomalies in their own right. None so much so that I felt compelled to place a hand in my pocket- but then again, if I did, it would not be money that I'd find nonetheless. There were records from those shops they'd once received overseas, for once, but those days were long gone and they never existed within that shimmered skin, never a barcode lest we regret. I didn't search for long at any rate: music enhanced the vision perhaps, slipped it by the double doors with that ease, but its effects were not cut out for the short term and the symptoms overtook after too long. I needed an immediate reign over me, and a wrought one nonetheless. 

Each shoe I saw in a flattering light quickly fell to a lower shoe size than my one, or a higher one should they be masculine- all of this, of course, killed me. I went home with no fashion forward traces to the desolate household. It was worse than usual, even, since nobody was home and thus with a cold, lonely creaking was I greeted. We were not happy to see each other, which was reflected in a grandiose scale when the creaking continued all throughout my making of tea. I had been hungry all day but I surreally knew that there was no point taking up eating now- not when I would have to filter pasta bits from the pans when my father returned. The reason I have not seemed to mention him much is that he was an apathetic, cold dial of shoe polish that clung only to potentially beautiful or striking things, and as I was meant to be his daughter he could never form that basic foundation with me. I must’ve said before that I found it all so charming when people didn’t believe they had the room to be distant or neglectful. My aunt was one of these people, in that she seldom visited and when such was the case it was veiled already by nightfall, wherein I would be sent to bed fluffed up in my pink pyjama bath set my grandmother had sent over from some Primark in London- not that I cared, as the water runs and the foam thins away to a glimmer. Through her ignorance towards me I grew all the more needy, and not for some odd affection but rather guidance through my life(even at the time it had began falling flat to the cardboard slants). I suppose I could credit her for my ongoing ability to steal attention from others since my first case of it had stemmed from someone who cared little about me nor what I did nor what was done to me. I had followed her around the family barbecue at one point, when my aunt who my mother found intolerable had held one, and instead of catching on to my odd idol worship towards her instead Jaqueline grew quite mad. She had opened her mouth and ripped me apart by each creased, rotten fang until I lay out to bleed, all the while with a beef scent breathing up the air. She had engaged me in a conversation and then toko her advantage in maturity and knowing better to spit at me somewhat viciously. 'You're not even that young anymore' she'd said, smudging out some mascara below her lashes until it disintegrated into her eyebags and caused them more prominence than if she'd never worn it all. 'What will your mother think?'

'She doesn't think about me,' I should have said, though it wasn't for the most part true. Where my teachers encouraged and listened and opened themselves up, inviting infections from sticky hands and those who could not learn to live without biting down on their thumbs, she remained closed off, conceited as she'd ever been, though I say to you right now that green was never her colour. Even during that barbecue she had sat with my father upon a wicker swinging chair set- the mature kind- and faced off against the white picket fence until her eyes occasionally squared in on people with ugly outfits. She did not once look over as Jaqueline insulted me in great amounts, but also I very much doubt she would've ran her hands through the flesh and pulled out a bone regardless. I was never sure about her feelings towards Jaqueline; one moment she would be so warm and handy pandy and ringlets with the tea but the next she would proclaim to me that my aunt was a stuck up narcissist who'd abandoned us all to shoot for the cigarette fumes in New York City. Take a guess as to which I believed at the time. 

I wasn't sure what caused my love for rejection and the shame that wandered off after it, but its absence was exclusive to my parents. I made the tea and the froth ran cold even before I'd sat down due to our high voltage fridge that my mother had considered a mandatory purpose. I did not even like tea so much, but still I was quite enchanted with the idea I harboured about returning to death dissolved in two sugars. For whatever reason, it was almost as if the winter was there to keep me company- although I may mention it quite a bit it has never really embraced me the way it did there, dimming the sky just for my sitting there and forcing down the tea. The froth I had called cold was now sweet too as the sugar ran down the cup in uneven amounts. I would have to go upstairs soon and suffer some more. It wasn't that I, in particular, found leisure in suffering, but rather it was all I knew how to do after school occupied me for a while as though a punch up at the gardens, the fountains rushing distantly and swallowing up the fallen leaves and there I'd be with the gables arved from painted iron and the cold hand busying mine. I looked at myself in the opposite mirror just above the television stand but mostly the top of my head was visible and not much else. It wasn't, as you were, gorgeous or arresting, but then again not many head tops were known to have that knife twisting effect on people. Maybe one day it would learn to stand out solely against starkness. I realised that I hadn't looked across the way when I had arrived home and now I almost regretted it, due to the fact that now I would continue to think about the boy for the next while, until he could be shaken off and flip to and fro to the ceramic tiled ground, translucent. I coughed and pushed some hair from my face, cursed in slight amounts, then willed for the tea to simply evaporate; it would leave a tan, endless patch on the ceiling that bronzed over when confronted with the right light. 

After this pondering I felt compelled to watch the television since I had yet to be burdened with company. It was something that I could never commit too- generally my father would be down here, completing the expert level sudokus against his wedding album due to its hardcovered nature. The low light bulbs had turned him just forgivably blind and now he struggled to read the calorie counts on the milk cartons, but after some time filled with him asking me over and over what it was he had it memorised enough not to bother with the drinking or the asking. I worried about him when I cared, which wasn't often. I worried that instead his pot belly would shrink back to his organs and crush them until they failed. Therefore we would have to sit in a damp hospital waiting room and flick through last month's Entertainment Now! when the doctors stippled along his ribline with bovines and the like. God, was I terribly worried, when it swayed me in my vulnerable moments. So he never sat and watched television but hindered my ability to nonetheless. I wasn't sure I'd heard from the outside world- the world beyond my field of vision- for months now. New York could have been swallowed up by the event horizon and I would not know until a victim showed up to the doorstep, skin charcoaled and crumbling. However, sadly, it was growing evident that I would not and will not have business with New York in the foreseeable future, unless thus far it had undergone a disguised apparel in my wake. 

The remote was larger than I remembered, yet I supposed that was what happened when one strayed far from a thing and imagined its obstruction to drive shadows to rest sleeplessly. When I switched it on the screen lit up with the aquamarine background from a talk show wherein people seemed brimming with the desire to yell at each other and bicker, though I didn't understand much heaped beneath their thick, smogged accents. From what I could gather it all had something to do with the stolen sum of two hundred pounds, or something in that regard, and the mother was quite annoyed about it. Her hair was browning over but I believed it had at one point been bleached- perhaps it was a horrible job done from it and thus the brown. Her daughter sat by her attacking some bald man, and by this I mean accompanied with many, many syllables slurred together by natural order of speech and this rabid viciousness I would have developed beneath the correct climate, yet it had not emerged within me or anyone else that I knew. The host wore a pinstripe suit that did no wonders upon his tall, slim figure, but when I say slim I do not mean it with any warm respect or warmer visage. I could laugh at it really- where he stood, it warped beneath the fixtures and often distorted his body as he stood, sat, etcetera. I realised with a start why television hadn't been an inherent crush for me. It was overly romanticised and I had never lived with any drama. Even now you can observe that in the days leading up to this villainous party I am still aloof as ever, not that you've known me for perhaps longer than a few days. How strange it was that these observations have continued throughout my entire lifespan! That way back in elementary school, I still stood to be seated and still was seated to stand. It was all so different now, yet as the cliche forms it was all most certainly the same, and my trajectory was intensely pathetic, I hoped one day to rid myself of it. Perhaps I am too ambitious, but it was the sole canister that slotted into my hope and will to go on, if such a thing still existed through the mundanity that even so incited a discomfort within me and those around me just the same. 

I went with it. The show was gradually descending to less of a spectacle and more something to seethe over, and so I changed it around for a while, chasing any boredom away to the best of my abilities, but the climb was steep and I submerged into a lucid dream, perhaps, or a paralysis I'd assumed otherwise from. 

I fell deeper through this glass with the consistency of air and began to let all emotions slip away and all movement, motion, and physicality dispersed in the same manner. I could not mourn it for it was far more convenient for me. But there it was, unravelling to whites to greys and inevitably to darkness. I had a dream then; a horrible, memorable one that pained me to host. It was embedded with an anguish so potent that it was evident to note it wasn't by my own hands that I suffered, nor had it ever been mine to claim in the first place. 

It was about Nina. 

  
  
  


_ CHAPTER SEVEN: DREAM _

You wouldn't have known her. This was something I could say to anyone; they wouldn't have known her either, perhaps moreso than me but always back in the boards. She wasn't someone who many people got the chance to even look at due to her flightiness. She was reclusive in the manner I wished I had the courage and confidence to be, and though she was so lonely it had never disrupted her self esteem. This was something I'd always thought noble of her. It wasn't that she annoyed others, but rather she never sat right with them, and thus she extracted herself from anyone else's memories. Possibly she viewed it as merciful, but I hadn't felt spared in her absence so much as dismayed. I wanted to talk to her more all her life, and for the few I'd lived through her too. She was the antithesis to Laura's collective appeal. Her clothes were low, formed by whatever stood behind her rather than their own silhouette, baggy and without shape, and her hair was slicked through with a surreal blackness that didn't exist at night. It appeared all the more darker beneath the kitchen lights, in which I had only ever seen her. Though she was younger she folded this air up with her that one often perceived as innumerable maturity beyond her cherub nature, her lack of definition in facial features and mental capabilities. Perhaps it was because she had read enough, which was hardly something to discount when it came to my ignorant self. Before me she had been a compacted deity I would never fully understand yet yearned towards all the same. Beauty and grace concealed fully by her bedroom walls and never allowing an opening to be ruined through observance, and this was truly how I saw it, perhaps even a bit in love with it all, though this was hardly appropriate for reasons I should explain but almost cannot bring myself to. I was fortunate enough that she remained unopened around me, yet still she remained around me. It could have been that her hand was forced by Laura but I liked to believe it was because I wasn't as awful as I had been lead to believe by those among me. 

Nina wore a school bag fashioned from fake crocodile skin; a handbag almost, cracked up into grids with each ferocious scale, and it so much as possessed a gold plated buckle upon its front side. She did not seem to have friends and instead surrounded herself with reading, perhaps as a reason to claim she herself was busy- or this was what I would assume if I was anyone else, but because it was her I felt she might sincerely enjoy reading just as much as any isolated being. I saw her around school during lunch at times and often considered approaching her, though I was held back by Laura's mere existence which one couldn't deny was rather daunting. Knowing now that Nina was dead was quite the difficult task. It was as if Laura had said it, that my life was cold with her and would be cold without her too. I had only set foot in her room once but I understood with certainty what Laura had meant when she'd said that it still lingered with that characteristic Nina chill. So you see, she had died just on monday and I didn't provoke Luara for the information. It was easier to adjust, almost, if it was obstructed from me so; I had never wanted to know why a fourteen year old girl would die quietly in her family house, just like many people who had been confronted at the right time felt in their obituaries. She did not yet have one in any case, nor could I imagine seeing her black and white photo that would be greyscaled much the same should it be ran through a coloured fax machine, due to her lack of care for the technicolour. I couldn't imagine sitting there in the morning with my torturous tea bag withering along the boiled water as my father moved his boney figure into the seat across from me, flipped open the newspaper, and said, 'isn't that Laura's sister?'

Laura's sister who I had adored, I would suppress. It was easy to do so when one had such a small mouth as mine, and my teeth were not large physically but they buried many of my thoughts in their white, plasticine graves before I could even chew at them. No one had spoken to me about Nina's death, and seldom so did Laura wish to bring it up either. It was as if we were attempting to rectify her cautionary tale and straighten it out into a misconception about a person's absence- this girl had never been there in the first place, how could we miss her with any sanity? It was schizophrenic, thusly, when I was transported through to my delirious dream state and I saw her. It wasn't in life that I saw her either. Her coffin appeared large, vast and coated with a floral white paint. I was beneath the ground with her, perhaps to keep her some company while god was still thinking to remember her. The ivory had yet to vanish as it had yet to show itself, and if angels carried harps I would not know because their grand entrance was either mystified or nonexistent completely. So she was there within this coffin. This was the purest helm of comfort I'd felt that week, in the dream. She was the only person who had ever accurately portrayed myself when I had disguised the wondrous negatives about my character. When my future self looked in the mirror I saw her, and that was quite the passionate thing. Perhaps I'd harboured some strong feelings for her when she was alive and I embraced them even moreso through her death. How odd a thing it was!

Still, I could never quite claim that she had bene a friend before Laura was, if that thing had ever quietly occured. I simply found something about her to set me aflame, but not in this ravenous way that ravaged up waking moments and undeveloped brains, or ones whose tide had turned with the great inclusion, the white crystals dashing from waves so stretched out one could see the flat silhouettes all the way through while the flat fish rode along with them. It twisted at me only when I saw her or thought about her, but I never felt in particular compelled to do so- this was why it was a subtle deterioration. In any case she was there with her coffin that I could view the surface of lacking in all conscious thought, but it was as though I had some extra viewpoint that allowed me to see her where she laid. Her face was still cherub like in nature and her mouth was every bit as red as it had ever been, just perhaps with the spidery parts paler than usual, though it was in no way alarming to consider. Her nose remained unmoving and didn't so much as warp in its subtle amounts while the airway aired out. Pink crystal divine, sewn into as such months after the eulogies had been accompanied with a moonlight sonata, tailored through worked hands which had not defaulted over time, impossibly so, frills overlapping a cold lump of flesh formed into a girl that had once moved, the limbs splintering out but with all lovely senses, the skinniness but not the jut, the knees still rosy as though they'd been compressed by a satin gloved hand in which a hand born from satin rested quite the same, her stockings stopped right below them so that the flares were able to betray some ideas of prospective shin, the shoes dashed by light that had no business existing, red as they were, but they were stark and the most Nina esque moment to view upon her entire bodice, for it was no pink but it was no part that had been delivered through and imported with packing peanuts(they were beautiful ones nonetheless, in an amount so stacked that even I could transform to half the girl she had been and there would exist less doubt within my short lived life that was thus far un-severed), two gloves were cut from the human ideal and placed upon her stomach, and they happened to lengthen into two feminine arms that fully existed in a state of arching but not with any direction or ambition, and her fingernails were unpainted because if they weren't it would mean she had died in any other circumstance, perhaps salon suicide while her mother fiddled with the glowlight while the gel dried beneath this glowlight and the pink ran coral, and even the paint itself was an opaque coral, and it was so un-Nina like that I could've perished right there, but still she looked so right. Almost assuredly it seems as though I'm doting. I would not blame you for thinking so, due to the glow cast above the entire ordeal, but when I got done to it I was floating, through ambience, within a grave I should not be occupying, and through a coffin I could see her when she was not herself- she was not an object to me, moreso it was the sheer outfit and how it was as if they "styled" her first impression upon the angels that carried her up whenever they decided to appear. If you think I am having a moment then it becomes quite apparent that you haven't heard but a moment from my life, three days or so, and the rest were spoken of in my unreliable passing. I am a jealous person and in my dream I was jealous too. My hands were growing damp but it had never been from the manner with which the dirt heavied with rain; it was my eyes, blurred at the seams, and then letting a gradual sadness cover my fingertips. I was emotional enough that they were red, and aggressively not transparent. I was not crying because I missed her. She was with me just then, why would I? Why would I? Lord, give me a reason to care and I shall. It was a hinder to be myself and pick from different poisons at constant rates, decide whatever to catch a fleeting emotion from when they were so alien to me I could be swayed into believing I had escaped from a lab where I was never expected to don white in the first place. 

There Nina was, her face framed out by her hair which laid so straight down her yet never unleashed the volume into the coffin, lest it crumble open by the copper hinge and I be assaulted. It was beautiful, so gorgeous and so ineffective, the portraits with the blackened eyes and the odd slants placed down so they obstructed a humane lack of workmanship, the bones people enjoyed inventing for the human vitality, in which things seemed to stem as a huge entirety from aesthetic purposes and "prettiness", and she was it. I cried because I knew what I would do to her. 

It was probably raining above, since the weather often softened my head or made it exist depending on the way the mist went scarce at noon, if noon was accompanied with summer light. If not I was driven towards near insanity each time in what I liked referring to, inwardly of course, as my "seasonal deranged disorder" for it was quite deranged and quietly a disorder- not that my parents would ever entertain this idea. After all, wasn't it my father who had berated my aunt on her heroin use at the barbecue before everyone? And he had been conducting the place with his yes men and big boxes and short company and the spatula spattered from the marinade sauce. Needless to say anyone else's insanity held no weight within his life. Not that I was insane- just I was made to feel as such often. Right there it became the same ordeal once more, the same loops being worked into grooves and the same wavering eyes that threatened to spill opaque at any moment. I yearned to be closer to Nina but not for any missing or the like. I longed to cradle her as it would seal a proximity, though in her life or her ashes had I not once felt maternal when viewing her; she was young but she was quite obviously not mine, nor was I hers for that matter. The reason why I was so utterly beside myself the drown was slowing, forgiving was that I wanted to pull her hair out by the strand, and it'd detach from her scalp as though a lace front, unravel through diagonal thought patterns, series of sheen and pain for me and her alike. When it was undone it'd sit upon my hands as a thirty foot long black thread so thin it could not be seen even with light. It was looped just above her skull and it disrupted the blood, thus the pale face stuck out more than god had ever anticipated, or of course a biological human, though they are two different breeds. 

I wanted to unlatch the coffin. It would snap into two copper flots and one would make a noise against the faux white board. The two pieces both appeared like caramel frozen in a mystery, as their eloquence was deepset and their colour was a bit more brown than yellow, yet sticky, surpassing abilities most commonly expected from the two dimensional colour. After it was unlatched I would open it and eject all the spiders so they were free and could therefore breathe through the dirt, rather than upon satin that sucked the air from the air until it was a more hated form of shiny white parchment that welled beneath the sun or the candle. There she lay, and I knew it now although the coffin had remained closed. Still it would feel different as she would be before me and her entire body would uphold perspective. Her red dashed shoes would appear larger, other miscellaneous examples, but the home invader had succeeded mere moments ago. 

Then the hair would undergo the attacks, the fruits of my laborious drilling, and it would sit against my wrists, cutting seven or eight lines that sectioned off veins from their compulsory counterparts. I would be able to embed it upon my own head, right above the skull, just as it had been before it was implanted upon me- she would have no idea when it came to this part, but still it was delightful to think that she would lie bald, rotting, claiming earthworms up from the needley grass, and I would have long since attained my goopy black hair that led the boys to the love with ease. Taking one’s hair was a vicious motion that girls completed viciously- what else could you expect from an animal like myself other than apparent manslaughter? If she was not dead, my senses would have overcome each other one by one, each time occuring to themselves that they had new red layers to push to the brim, and rise eventually up to my brain’s flat plato, where the animal circuits tended to the animalistic cells and the animalistic cells in turn, politely, restlessly, nursed the memories intercepted by a human girl, and then there would be me. A silhouette would not grace the first hit, nor the second. Soon she would be beaten and bloodied- so much so that from her cracked rib a laborious note could be extracted. It was all very artistic, almost, in my head. It begged the question: what was art without this Leah thing? No one would from then on know the answer, and the answer would also never warp with time, as all things tend to do. My credit was black and goopy and drawn from a head like a blood stream. I had never worn black better in my life as I did during that dream; the incisions against darkness, the coffin raided so, but vanity conquered all in the end. It was a crying shame that the manner with which I levitated through the dirt could not be copied over to the phantom strands and I was caught underground forever. This was where a piece of me came to that endless stop wherein it was not demolished but it could not proceed with my fish eyes. This was where I unlearned empathy. 

  
  
  


_ CHAPTER EIGHT  _

Extreme jealousy. 

I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. With those words I've at once been exalted towards a higher plane of existence and besmirched for the simple wrongdoing of knowing what is a fault and being aware as such, rather than rectifying much ado about anything at all. Extreme jealousy- this is the green girls despise the most, but adore openly upon each other. It was so easy to pick out from a face and an artificial sternness brought on by the seasons spent alone beneath weathered bus shelters. There was something an irresistible and celebrated evil that surrounded picking out the trait from the stern faces the most, their box mouths pulled back by some peg contraption which worked to propel the gums, and to feel the eyes upon oneself when doing something so simple as striding a hall(yes, striding, for the boast that a body can somehow naturally possess was a spectacle among a general public) but my jealousy was not one to be enjoyed- I felt it flow over me often. From the dream onwards, it ravaged at me just as I wished to ravage at it in much the same fashion, so is the root and its dainty spinning. 

I went out before my parents returned, though I kept the lights on within so there was a perimeter about the house cast over entirely by a dull grey that wasn't sharp on the eyes. I wanted to look across the way, but I had been unguised and my blindfold's ribbon caught through the gnarls too easy, and it all fell apart before me; in an abundance that lead one to be quite incapable of caring afterwards. We had never owned a lawn chair, and it was but the one time that I had strewn upon one beneath the unwavering sun for a summer I'd once spent away. The gridded texture along the fabric had always irritated my back which was supposedly meant to be exposed in order to tan, and there I had felt my blood boil up and down- not with any mental drivel- through my horrible crystal blue swimsuit with its straps that connected by some flimsy black plastic material. When I'd looked up there was a pool boy to be thankful for, but he wore shorts and his legs were positively abhorrent, and enough so that I refrained from dips after they had been in contact with the pool. I knew no chlorine could alter the horrific effects. He drained out the leaves from the overhanging tropical willow with a large sift most imbalanced at the poker of a stick, and the net was grated enough that sometimes spiders would catch in the fibers, just a bit crushed. I hadn't the patience for spiders either. All the time it seemed more and more impossible to watch boys without repercussion, should they be direct or a simple hinderance upon all the viewing pleasure and withheld leisure. What I really must say is that I was no novice when it came to the activity. The motions some girls took to look at boys were familiar in my repertoire, and it took little cycling to make an appearance with a sufficient technique. Yet after my dream I had woken with my eyebags purple tenfold, as though strung by human stingers, and they were highlighted in the wrong places biologically- the brightness never sat upon them quite right through the sheeneed mantelpiece surface and its thick black marble columns side by side. There were razor shells layered beneath some marble or so that shone through only occasionally, but they were a delight nonetheless. It was one thing I supposed my mother could not improve upon should she somehow gain the motivation once more. And it had all been ruined for me by those under eyes, the eyes themselves nothing to bring home to the parents either, as they were cloudy and distant, drowned almost, by what I perceived in the flesh as a little death lacking any orgasmic virtues whatsoever. I was disgruntled and put off by all I wished to religiously invade. An entire facet had been marred, and though my reins had fallen out from beneath me my guilt was immeasurable, even if I perhaps still conspired towards those beautiful, fringed, goopy, inky locks. I wanted nothing more than to be launched from the face of the planet- once an alien had told me, lucidly, that the scenery on the moon was tremendous and 'worth the gush, so to speak'. I had rectified my previous impression that aliens were machine esque beings. They aspired towards our great heights with more than double the resilience, and they enjoyed things profusely, admirably, flared by their endearing turns of phrase and gestures. I wished at once to assume myself as one but then again nobody about me would understand why the last reward had made my skin ripple over purple. However, my eye bags would no longer have to suffer alone. They would slip beneath notice since all odd regards would be packaged by all the ways in which a girl can be purple and still so weirdly human, never humane. 

Here I was, Leah, I'd thought before my reflection. My mouth was lopsided since it had pushed against the table during my previous rest. At an odd angle it clotted blood until it ceased within my wake, but still there was a swell just at the curl that heightened the curl further. Along with the eyes(now pink, godspeed you sleep's horrorly effects) and the hair that sloped out against my neck, stubborn in its unflattering manner, the curved shirt tongues concealing one collarbone, which was one normal part I possessed. To be fair, it would only make sense to have a normal collarbone in this day and age. Anything else was quite unheard of short of birth defects or deformities, and both were not things I was sure about entirely. There was no way not to remark your own paleness at one point or another, and for me it was a feud that had been scathing by for years on its last legs that were dispensed at will. It had first been made clear to me when Laura and I had decided to go to the beach back during the Age of Innocence, as I now dub it, when it was far easier to get away with being a dirty sinner. It wasn't that I had no idea I did the wrong things and perhaps acted the wrong way, but rather it held no greater effect upon my esteem nor my livelihood within other people's palms. I was sure one day it'd return to do me in for the final breath, but back then I was gloating most days when the attention could be counted on fifteen hands, the hands of which were being extended towards my hair for a scruff. I was a daddy's girl and he had given me far more money than Laura had been given for the ordeal. Some for a swimming cap, so he'd claimed, but it was the classic upstaging we soon became known for among the parents committee. There was some infamy that was not exclusive to my mother's physical stunner legs, from which my little girls arms would loop naively while we were downtrodden, but also the easy spending she enjoyed with flamboyance- this was an oversight on her part, assuming jealousy was founded without any input from others. I had tucked the money away in a peculiar shark purse I'd uncovered a few weeks ago from my grandmother's "parlour", who was quite unaware in regards to its absence(this would continue for some conniving years, of course) and at any rate it was a part of me. I was assuredly presentable that day, since my mother had plaited my hair twice so that it could be slipped into the nylon cap easier when the time came for me to crack my money in two. The way she pulled each strand had been excruciating but I sated myself invariably with all these conflicting opinions about what would be upon my head; I was not sure, even then, what colour suited me best, whether it be a powdery pink sprinkled across ineffective Renaissance cheeks or an aquamarine boys loved but still viewed as feminine or even That Noir(I had been quite obsessed with the French language during my roots, seeing as to me it reflected a detached beauty humans would never comprehend or obtain no matter how much they flailed) with little white pivots that leaked down towards my nape. Would I slip my ears beneath the fabric or let them free? Would I don goggles or allow Laura to let me borrow hers? And more distressingly, would anyone I had come to despise so happen to also envy the pool life that summer day, and would an encounter with unhappiness be overdue? Though we were young, my parents still thought it best that I should take the bus despite some protests I had slipped in during our breakfast that morning- at one point, we would convene each morning as a family and cut the white from our eggs together. I had never enjoyed the specific, rusty taste that had married the grey crisp edges- or worse, the brown edges should the frying pan decide upon some immoral punishment towards myself and my peers. My brother was a fiend for them, however, and we each dispensed our portions to him upon an extra china plate my father's work colleague had purchased in Malaysia just for us. It was supposedly a product of this worldly hand painting skill that one could acquire from the ladies at the mall should they pay a pretty penny. When he said the mall he meant the ones whereupon the sun did not reflect the roofs white, but rather the orange brick crackled and warned the inhabitants that once it would slump and bury all the fine carpets beneath the pools of dust in great amounts. There were ladies who sat outside the businesses their men owned, and from time to time over tea they would take it upon them to paint or reach into some general beauty every self sufficient woman at that age could for whatever reason access. It had been the embroidery too, along seams imbursed with gold thread counted  by the thousands rather than anything else. He had been so dearly impressed, apparently, that his daughter sat down with a group all day to impress him with her own finery. They had taught her what had formed rivers to be beautiful, not through a spiritual teaching but rather the physical aspects involved in the golden ratio and the bundles of clearness once more betraying a blue so pigmented and so vivid it stunned the untrained eye: the one which was not entirely too used to everything in general and one that hadn't grown tired in lovely pursuits such as the opaque upon the horizon and the green that ran through spring trees. Where they lived, they rarely could find themselves with a scenic presence and thus it grew tumorous with weight. Their adoration was innumerable and he had told my father that there was something behind their eyes he had so far not observed within humans before, and afterwards his daughter's were level in just the same manner. Some aspects were enjoyed more than others but the material attribute locked through the plate was one that sparked a positive outrage. My father did not see it the same way, as he had said, 'it's nice, but what does it do for me?'

Well, it extracted the egg whites from our lives with justification- my mother was born to fulfill many novice, unfulfilled roles but not one had any involvement with the culinary world. My brother liked the design; rushing water from a naturous canal rather than one in the city realm wherein the cars were metal boxes subject to rocks and the sun beamed profusely, without warrant or accountability, never to be washed from but in that moment one would behold the water portrayed with that congeniality, and there was fauna displayed too, the grass soaking up the forget-me-nots and the suitcase daisies and the bundled blue and the miscellaneous colours blooming strongly, heavy on the eyes and on the mind somewhat, and a deer with antlers extended towards the clouds almost due to the way the buck situated upon a great mound of hill that rounded the river up; but at the end of the day what my brother lapped up most in regards to it was when its design was covered with more food. He was a glutton who learned to crave gluttonous things and following that- no, exceeding that- almost nothing at all. That was how it seemed after all. And I, well, I was a different case altogether, since I had been stunned from the first moment the plate had arrested some part within me, perhaps a fatness poked out from the trachea or the beautiful shimmer conducted by a large intestine beneath a fluorescence. It was invigorating and I knew that art was fully within my lane, should I strive, but not once had it strived for me and thus I remained for the most part lacking in the important definitions or features, and my visage remained solely carved out by others. 

The plate was the only blue one on the table at that moment. I wasn't thinking about this with great detail since I was less developed in many aspects, but I had asked my mother to pass the dairygold to smear on the egg yolk(a habit most people wished to have little interest in but did nonetheless).I was distraught with excitement. My mother was a bit concerned, though it was not in her nature to allow it to filter in alongside her general treatment of me. I had met up with Laura at the churchyard where I had sat some days ago- I still had a section within that cried out for the chip pan grease, even if it had perhaps only been a day or two ago- and she was wearing summer clothes one would acquire upon a mannequin at a supermarket, should they for some reason run a clothing portion just for the slight revenue obtained from brass buttons. From then on it was a lingering suffering that was evident in the air, all day it seemed, until rest that night. I was still, as you were, enamoured with boys for a reason I can no longer discern. I do enjoy the male form when kempt to perfection but it wasn't often that I was taken with a need to marry the nearest possible boy in order to be complimented or thrown the dinner scraps from the affairs. I would not wade and subject myself to the benefits from a mistress, when he returned home quite lonely due to non reciprocation and simpered within my arms that could not cover all the ground they wished to, nor open the rib cage and leave the heart to the wolves. I would not be shot through by a dart and puncture some blood and an artery but remain in the same physical state. I would not get sick to bring my legs further from each other, spread artificially but not without means, and the intentions laced with cruelty towards oneself, insecurity that dined until it was forced from the chair by a deitous hand, most gracious, or appear 'lovely', or feel the need to in any shape or form. But back then it was quite the blind item, and quite the different story indeed. I was shocked to discover that males somewhat enthralled me. My homeroom teacher had been kind due to his current state of employment at the time, and he also found an immense fulfillment within teaching only the noble could work up to themselves. I was obsessed for a bit, just eight and still wishing for a puppy Christmas I now know I would not have received. Due to this I was on the lookout for men all day(men I say, how messed up could one person be?). Laura did not understand, and so far found all her fortunate slices in other girls who braided her hair at sleepovers and gave her lifts to dancing and drew dream houses with her and sometimes even constructed them from furniture catalogues that were left at the cafeteria at her mother's workplace once, by some anonymous. I did not understand what it was that girls could accomplish without working towards a grander mean, or meandering endlessly but not without that unique malice I found but myself to have earned after some time. At the pool I was beside myself to find out that boys were not growing in homunculus forms from the chlorine powder upon the water surface. There were so many old people among us that I could, with ease, be lead to believe that I was some unexpected guest star contributing towards the youthful facade of a bingo game. They all wore pale swimming caps that did not serve their skin to a full extent. If I had it my way, the pools would indeed be sectioned by age- and even now I understand that pedophilia must be somewhat rampant within such a nudist sort of community that was generally treated otherwise. I made the decision not to enjoy myself, nor allow a smile to filter on through. It was injustice that I was subjected to remaining in a fixed area with a single boy to view! And Laura was something of a professional when it came to movements below a surface, and even not breathing for extended periods of time. The swimming pool was not glamorous to any barrier, nor did it gain much government funding. Also, there were not enough occupants to make do without this funding, and thus the windows were for the most part unwashed. They were large and all placed complacent upon the north wall so that a large block of light cast shadowy figures against the blue tiles one could only truly make out with some inhumane ability to breathe through liquid. The chlorine was plentiful, and with my eyes closed the sting still affected me so. In the changing rooms I had stripped down to a one piece, much akin to the kind all girls my age would have worn, and there were ripples of blue sequins dotted along the bodice. I was proud of it in the changing rooms last summer, though my mother didn't so much flatter me about the way it made my legs look stumpy. To this day I still do not understand how the constant judgement and emphasis had so quickly joined up with neglect. But back then I was loved enough that my swimsuit was rendered hideous, perhaps a monstrosity, and beside Laura I first noticed that I would never be able to get these boys I thought I wanted when stocked up by her- she was wearing pink, which was the colour to be donned by us and adored by others, beheld perhaps. She was wearing a silver swim cap that was obtained from a hotel she had divulged upon me numerous information about; numerous, useless information I would rather replace with chemistry ordeals but lacked the understanding nor the revision cards to. I removed my eyes from her and looked back at the old people, who were doing laps in a great vertical strip at the other end where the plunge really lay. They were greyish or pinkish but never quite humanely coloured. It was a disappointment, and my eyes stung once more, though the chlorine had long since become used to their presence so instead my skin turned icey and I faced away from Laura before she could observe my crying face. It pained me that she would enjoy all I could not, would not, and in my eyes, should not. I would never jockey a motorbike at the crack of dawn, unless the helmet could for whatever reason juxtapose my entire face. Burdened, I cried some more at the water until the pool guard grew concerned enough to, towards me, extend a thumbs up and an unsure ‘pleasant’ expression I greeted coldly, much to his disdain, I imagine, seeing as his mouth dragged down a bit and eventually slopped the ear off his coworker who was for the most part unaware that she worked at a pool. This causation occured to me when she ran across the margin in order to playfully smack him on the shoulder, though her advances did little with the loftiness of sexual attraction for he seemed quite annoyed. 

By the end it had all evidently dwindled. I suppose the moral of the story is that we cannot predict the days which breed the most sorrowful nights, since my crying spanned over a full darkness period during the summer air and wandered off the next morning- but it was hooked. At a young age I began to regress. People noticed- I believe this may be obvious- and then I became the Leah you now must have been acquainted with, as were the other people around me, or they were not at all and only seemed to, but either way it was the same dislike which cruxed about me most warmly.    
I decayed even then, outside the house. There were people walking by on the occasional gutter splash but nevertheless I was suitably alone, save for the occasional fleeting silhouette through the Woodsen’s sitting room window- or I had assumed it as such. I was sat atop the garden wall, parallel to the absent tin box car of my father’s bane. The rain would soon patch about it, but first it was quick to patch my rear with a huge wet stain from the brick, and I was unfairly dissatisfied despite the fact that I had known what I was getting into with this motion. The silhouettes were plain and simple and there. They merged sometimes, when a daughter passed a mother and the like. They never interlocked even when it seemed appropriate, such as when two exited stage left and a paternal and maternal form emerged and neither interacted nor nodded nor breathed.    
None of my business. Perhaps this was quite rich, but I felt only compelled to justify any specialised business when it involved the boy. He wasn’t attractive and I felt no attraction when I viewed just about anyone, but from my stupor he was enough: the blonde hair resounded a shift within me, almost, because it was all dotted with darkness when I boiled it down and in New York everyone would have the dark gelled figure just the same. He interested me like so, yet he didn’t show himself for the minutes I spent out in the downpour laced with the occasional and subsequently unexpected hailstone. By the time the third glittered off my nose I chirped back inside, and a resolve was founded for my case. If you are curious, I never favoured homework completion. This was why it was so surreal to resume the maths I had finished translating earlier- from a scrawl, of course- and the numbers were all a bit bitter, a bit gaudy, but they gave a break from perception, displaying for the first time ever an impenetrable window.    
The hair clogged up my shower drain even though it didn’t fall. When my eyes weren’t clouded with shampoo or closed to prevent this they drifted towards the steel circle. Caught up in the mechanical webbing there were hair clumps, immersed with that unnatural darkness Nina’s always reflected; this was why I knew it was both intangible and unbeknownst to me. I pushed at it with my foot but it always passed right through. My mind was truly diabolical. I thought of no other who could hurt me so, and with twice the intent no less. What was it that proved injustice could be inherent, other than this monstrosity? 

Abnormally, my sums were completed post-shower at the kitchen table. The mother was ‘resting her head’ and I assumed this was on her pillow or the toilet seat or sometimes, if she was feeling like a mongrel, the sink. I was left to my own devices without the usual restrictions. It was odd and enlightening, a bit, that things floated so easily in a different environment. What I mean by this is that I was lounging through the hour, burnt from the tongue all the way up the nose bridge aflare. I had never lounged languidly before- not since I had ventured abroad, and even then it went without saying that they weren’t family affairs, though this concept didn’t escape the household. The sofa was nice in a fashion it had never captured before. The cushions were mismatched but due to my delirious state my mother’s interior dressing had nearly gained a chique air, though this betrayed many ideals about neatness one could learn to possess despite their circumstances. The television now adopted an extra flare, and with great addition it leaped forward, vibrant, when the late show hosts awoke from their afternoons spent beneath surgeon’s hands or dietician schedules or even workloads. There were celebrities I had only heard licks about before at the panel and they all wore wigs, which amazed me. I had never seen someone wear a wig without any hint of jest before but now it was getting realised as a sincere fashion, method towards inhuman apparel that always enthralled every inch of me, and the silver girls with their hair laid before their well styled shirts weren’t ghostly so much as aquativc. The strands would ripple this way and that, shingle into scales upon scales upon scales upon scales upon scales upon scales upon scales upon scales all the way to the hips. Fixed down in the chair they spoke of love life, career, music and other celebrities with an odd presence across the air but were not present across the flesh. They jockeyed between wit and enthusiasm but never struck gold in the action of striking both simultaneously. Still, it was a wonder to see them and have the constant reminder, the itch, that it was live, and I was transfixed by this notion- that somewhere quite distant this person sat and saw what I saw through a bias, the lights and the crew; even an audience was before them previous to me. The audience would be a terror, I supposed. A joke was not something that could ever possibly tend to all levels of human loneliness. At one point the laughing would exclude a person and they would be disappointed- often this was reflected with a dead eyed look. It would crush my soul to witness this even as a celebrity, although I was fairly sure that it would not be a concern whose commonplace was my lap before the fire. The hosts were nice too, but never so much that it affected their lack of personality, because niceness would never be half the fire a flaw was. A unique outlook never flourished outwards from it, and though it would do for a while no one sought it out to rib against them for a lifetime. 

It had been a while since, in the true sense of the word, I had understood basic maths. Primary school was a liar that continued to spout all the paper thins until graduation night, and even then they had promised a buffet but only gave to us cups with juice and foil trays of digestive biscuits which had laid air prone for hours on end. All day, perhaps. It had lead me to believe that making it was an option. Everyone else that spoke on the matter agreed with the exact same feeling, the slump and the following fall that skipped and frolicked but never caught nor thrust any joy. Yet lined with all this lounging I felt so inclined to learn, and the pen bristled not against the page but rather made leaps and bounds. A simple cure was not one that anyone ever bothered with, nor had I; it seemed the sitting room could cure many problems I hadn't realised would lift me even a bit, and thus the floating was dispelled upon others. I wondered why my mother wasn't down here and instead chose to grovel about, perhaps even sparing my tapes a listen if I were to be so unfortunate. It was a shame that it was a once off and that I compacted my cheeriness upstairs again. Possibly it wasn't even compacted- it could have been stowed away downstairs, inaccessible yet again. My yoga mat was unrolled from yesterday, as I had been attempting to work out sometime after school in the hopes that it would alleviate some stress- though I was neglecting my homework to fulfill my theorem and thus the stress greyed over once more. The sheen was unstabbable and ambrose, resigned up to a slickness that looped around most toffee, and it lay beautifully between two collar bones that I swore were connected. Should a doctor remove this amber my stress would have no room to grow within and I would be saved until it leached away at my brain bits once more. 

My room was darker than I remembered. The dawn crept in and muddied it slightly, but it was mostly upon my realisation that the party was coming up so close I could taste an alcohol so strong I had not tasted before, thus passing by all sensical means. Drink would be quite the laugh, I supposed, if spun in the right light, and if one fulfilled the condition that fun was a direct cause of and solution to vodka. There would be bodies among us, and Laura would socialise and dily dally about the floorpans until her little heels could just not stand it! She had even told me that she'd selected the heels in advance, that they were birthday gifts from a distant relative last year who had not yet returned from some great expedition along a tropical coastline she had not cared about to highlight, and only cared about with the passing effect of the heel's beauty to begin with. They would be held between a finger and a thumb much later on. I looked over and found that there were no shoes I could wear, despite my having believed divinely beforehand that I was overlooking some ornate, sparkly pair all these years, though I now see it for the conditioning it truly is. I wanted to think I had access to effeminate gestures such as donning the red gloss in whatever form one chose to choose or the pencil skirt that created a divide in colour when the legs stretched to a pyramid, and turtlenecks that caught upon the bust and for the most part glowed. Another stream within me had taken a liking to gothic, which, by the way, I had no clue how to emulate. It was all newspaper to me, the black and white but never read(hah) and the margins were always overly squiggled. You had to have the craft beforehand when attempting it, but unfortunately I was not born with it and had been unassumed for too long to begin now. 

I opened my wardrobe and found nothing. The clothes hangers were all facing different ways, obnoxiously so, but I would not rectify them there- it wasn’t the right state of mind. No surprises but I felt I might cry, for some indiscernible reason. Sometimes this wind blew over my head and tufted my hair in a way a replicated, in the external sense, with my hands through the mop, and then I would cry for a bit yet never quite for a lot. It was an ordeal when it made the eyes go red. One would have to wait some considerable time before venturing downstairs, unless the parents were for whatever reason trusted with one’s emotions, though I have come to notice that this is rarer than assumed of others. I wanted to cry because my dresses were all flimsy and small, even on the day I had gotten them, and if I wore them they would quickly uncover a whole mound behind me that I wished not to let just about anyone view, and my underwear was all in-extravagant, not red or black or pink, and granny esque since I found a comfort when the frill extended just a slight amount towards my thighs. I still do not understand why, but it was almost a security or a change. Girls at sleepovers had before deemed them ‘bloomers’, which I did not have the heart to disagree with. Also, I wouldn’t have the means either, since they were probably correct in their opinions. 

I surveyed a blue dress for some time. It was a vague heap, a smock even, dotted with the occasional blue sheen reminder that caught the light more than I had hoped for when I’d slipped it on. I had no recollections about where it was from but I knew that it was indeed of my own guilt, or perhaps had been breadth from that of my distant mother’s. Or maybe it was upcycled from a Christmas horror and regifted to my name, for I never knew when to speak up, nor did I have such a shortage of clothes that I might have to resort to wearing it out in the open. The skirt was not fitted right, and the hemming had been done- my best guess- by a threaded tennis racket cut up to needles. It was very hideous and frightening, and it cast a terrorous fog around my form. I ought to have thrown it out the window, but I feared that a cat might make off with it from curiosity should they be able to carry it with their pseudo fangs. 

It stung a bit that Laura was the sole keeper of the key and I needed the box opened with such disparate longing; desire, even; and I would have to present to her a self I knew but retained who wore only what was convenient but not flattering. I would have to ask if she could gaze past this and find the ominous, hopeful spark at the velvet lining and unhinge the box as so, and the mirror would spring up and catch her eyes before they caught mine, instantaneous, though we both gazed. I needed her divine intervention, to teach me things I would never understand but could spout, and dress me up like hers. And perhaps that was a feeling which ran too deep, beneath scar tissue and muscle tissue and other tissues- but I would not uncover it or free it thusly, nor would my hand find itself anywhere near the stone which kept it all in place, damned it and shone bright when it could lap up the polish. 

I needed her tomorrow. Apathetic, I was complacent in regards to the fact that her social standing was diminishing right beneath her black brogues and soon she and I would be of the same grain. Her forced consciousness would mimic my own and we could discuss the rest. We could hold grass on the hill between three boney, skinny ridden fingers and speak on matters such as death, deterioration, exclusion and reputations that did not deserve smiting but would receive it much the same. I was ready for that excuse to pull at my arms until they delatched a small strip up and down the shoulders, sickly pink, and strengthened was my thoughts about the injustice gone rampant. I removed my clothes before a mirror that night, in which I rarely observed myself for reasons that inherit blunt force trauma. It had been a while but I looked just the same as I always had. My legs were too far apart, too curved for that of a human’s, and it streaked a minimal scream across the brain. The gel set to a matte with a large, blocked imprint across it and my nerves would remain touched forever. I did not put pyjamas on because I suspected myself of some eroticism if I were to see the boy through my window again, and perhaps I would cradle a hand between my legs if the effort bore any entertainment or semblance. The room was cramped with the lights off or on, but in the dark I slipped into bed and imagined I was waiting for my husband during our honeymoon at San Francisco, but he had just committed suicide in the bath and a huge red carpet of blood was suspended along the modern grit tiles, though for now I was ignorant, and ignorance was not comfort until it was no longer ignorance itself, after all, thus I was comfortable but not thrilled perhaps, and thus I had pinned some purple sky to me and the wine was melting the ice among itself at the aluminium bowl, and it was propped up so the foiled bottle cap pointed towards the Northern star and possibly the city of Jerusalem, though I could not see this through the window due to not only geographical differences but also the urbanite landscape which seeped up to the horizon, and I was faintly terrified but not enough so that I could allow my veins to drop cold or run off to the bathroom, calling his unknown name which would soon prove to be a death sentence, and along his forearms would be some slices and dices, but the shampoo would not have caught up in it, rather he floated muddy, submerged in the dusted tub water. This was a doom that affected me even now. I didn’t know from what angle it should be approached, for it was so quick to pounce against the cage and manipulate a red before its irises, yet there was no way nothing at all could be accomplished. The pillow was stiffer than usual, and I was stunned to find my mother had done the sheets and duvet while I was at school this morning, and now the new cushion was parcelled with sand and covered by an entire blue block and it was restless to turn against it, writhe almost, but that was what I did nonetheless. 

The party was some feat. I had yet to succeed- unbeknownst to the general, it was far more usual that people either succeeded at parties or failed rather than any other supplement, though from time to time it was quite the task to discern- but I was hellbent, drunk off the prospect and my chest seized when I ran it over in my head. I would win and be inaugurated into a circle with a center part, and the teal would glow me up from within, a light trace. I would not fail. I could not fail and I would not fail as if it was all the same effort placed in different shapes. 

You may be surprised to hear that it was a good night. I slept and the sleep also waltzed with me, and the dreams played nice, floated a bit upwards so they cast shadows from all ends, and if there were any splinters they were frosted lovely, rosy gingham sweeping up a girl’s legs somewhere across the world, and she just so happened to stop by right when a manic state had been arranged in the near future. This was it then, I thought, somehow while unconscious. 

  
  
  


_ CHAPTER NINE _

Laura had forwarded some information. 

It was the day of and she was not wearing the correct school uniform, once again providing some back up in regards to her sinister, rebellious streak many a teenager possessed more subtle, and while I admired her trousers with the one leg over the other she pulled her lunchbox apart as though it were a clamshell. Today the weather had amounted towards a large pool that grated against the grates outside, upon which many dead insects could be sifted out from if anyone cared at all about horse flies or drowned bumble bees. Nevertheless they were abhorrent, and due to this the teachers had given their word that although we could stary beyond the thresholds it wasn’t a prized possession of an idea and would result in missed work when the inevitable sick day was eaten up as a capsule. I enjoyed days like this only sometimes- it was far harder to conceal isolation when everyone busied up the room you pursued the cloud of loneliness in, and the desks were pulled together until there were three square, empty meters surrounding your two black shoes. Laura was integrating with my anomaly and thus she had made due with my presence. I could tell by her mouth that it often ran through her an ache, but she was not impolite and therefore it would remain a secret between her and her sanity. She was more tired than she was used to, and it appeared to be her first dance with this prospect entirely. When she spoke she leaned in first, perhaps considering the mind maps of those among us and how they often viewed others as inconveniencing for simple, repetitive matters, and she spoke too loud and grew red, but her mouth was so close to my face I supposed it would not be the first thing I would grow shame outwards from. "It's on late," she told me, a hand removing the plastic from a pink waffle cone; this was one thing I would require proof that people above the age of eight still consumed, but there she was to fulfill the wishes and dryness and siege sparked up by stifling dread worked through by others. I removed myself backwards from her before she could say anything more and grace my cheek bone again with the hot feeling. Her freckles disappeared when her face was shadowed in much the same fashion it had been then, the flecks burrowing beneath a greyish skin pumped up by oil and beauty and air. She exerted this all. "I'd say around nine, maybe eight if it starts early but my friend, the host- well, she's not known to be reliable. But she never cancels her plan completely. It just doesn't work out the way it's meant to every single time. She's only moved here recently, now that I think about it, but before I only knew her from summer camp. Crazy, isn't it? It's not like I talk to her or anything, but she still talks to me. Anyway, it's on around eight or nine, and I can meet you at the steps or something like that if you're allowed out that late-"

"I'm always allowed out," I said, perhaps more gloomy than was appropriate. It was meant to be stitched through by a vague optimism and a vague compliance people willed from others but never envied, yet from my tongue it was spiteful just the same- there was no other resort when it came to Leah, really, which was why Jaqueline was quite the polar opposite and fulsome the happier space to occupy, but she was far enough from here that the public transport seeped with ink in my daydreams and it became quite like the deep sea, shrouded by a mystery, a chance of fish(which I adored, this being New York and the like), but alas I had yet to uncling from my captors when it came down to it. I had brought a sandwich for lunch that was sloppily constructed before I left- yes, before, by a moment or two- and it almost fell apart when I extracted it from a rubble of cling film. In the cling film the grey appeared crosshatched and I chose to dwell on this rather than anything else. People in my class surrounded me, as you can imagine, and it was greatly, offensively displeasing.  

In the future I would like to rent out a boat and disappear, one day, as the famous outlines along the pages do. People talked but it never sifted across the waters and presented to them an unrest, and the glimmering crashed together endlessly and the yellow submerged at night but it was always there- the gold, much the same state and perhaps a clone in its entirety, would wrap up handles of waves where the apex sat and the moon waved downwards. It wasn’t my affixation with fish so much as a longing to escape. For my whole life it had been occuring, and soon it would consume me down to my mismatched socks and my toes cut to stumps and the marrow of a delicate ankle or two. I was not sure if Laura knew I hadn’t the faintest idea what she was saying. It was all the more depressing to confess that, should I warm my thighs to, I could hear her and only her and drown away from every other mouth detached from an ear detached from a face detached from an identity; I was weary and I didn’t want to change, I just wanted everything else to. I clasped my sandwich some more until she gave me an odd smile, one that leaked condescension from the curls. It was evident then that she viewed me as a project or a child one could wash their hands of entirely if they had the willpower to do so. Her mouth got closer to mine, but I drew back and considered whether it could be conscious or not, and found five universes from the thousands and thousands of iterations wherein it would not strangle a blackhole to do so. “Leah,” she said, “are you listening to me?”

_ We don’t all listen to you all the time, Laura,  _ I thought. “Of course,” I said, which was among other fabrications a lie at the bucket’s pit. I was fed up. My sandwich was, if not negative, ‘ahead of its time’ due to the rancid, clinical taste the ham and bread conjoined to create. It was a bit impressive that two things in succession should replicate air so verily. I put it back on the clingfilm after one more bite- hard to stand, deteriorating stomach lining it sat. I moved back in my chair so that the slab irritated my back, though it was mild and moreso brought on by a head cold I had caught last week from my little cousin who was born, besides the stupidity and ignorance and gasps for light, with an immune system weaker that polystyrene, and each winter his organs deflated some more as the air was let out through the white. I was no longer suffering but I may just as well have been. Still, there was no escape and perhaps it was the correctly courteous to accept her warmness and proximity and conversational drive since it was quite asset from the other moments taken root at the base of a lunchtime depression and a sad, sad sandwich. “I’ll meet you on the steps. I guess… I’m just,” I paused, to let on that I was contemplating something that would be a horror to draw from my pink mouth. Little did she know that indeed it was something I’d set out to do last night and harboured throughout the day. It was brewing still, diluting my acid into a blue. “I have no idea what to wear. What were you thinking of?”

“Well I really wasn’t gonna think about it yet,” Laura pushed my own lunchbox away from her tepidly, one pinkie now a splotch redder than it had been before. She smiled back at me to distract from the sheer impoliteness, but I was beyond exhausted and offense was an emotion that could be extracted only from those who cared, in deep amounts, about things that affected others more than themselves. Or if it affected them too it was a minute thing that one could choose not to focus on with a lazy ease. Still, it was more convenient to reel her upwards and sputter some black oil from the pier wall against the scales while I was at it, simply because I could access the manipulation. I had her hooked in through the lip, and the tip jutted out shinier than it had been, now catching the fixtures as though it was attractive and marvelous at once. In regards to her not having thought about it, I was bewildered, accustomed as I had become to the party’s weight upon my spine. Yet I knew that it meant little at the end of the day, somewhat, to people in the right mental state to enjoy punch with accuracy rather than with violence. “It’s not formal,” she said for whatever reason; I imagined this was to ward off any misconceptions that I, an obvious lonely girl out in the open, wisted about parties previously. I had not been planning to cast a red triangle across my dress in any case. “Everyone’ll just wear slutty clothes anyway. Or at least, other girls will, but that’s not really my scene.”"Just wear something that you're comfortable- oh, but it can't be too prim, or too open, or too colourful or too weird or anything like that. If you're like me you'll just wear jeans and a nice top, but I'm not sure you are."

While I was still making up my mind on whether I should be offended by that statement or not, the bell sounded and wafted across the room a temporary silence. It never lasted long, nor did anyone expect it to, but rows upon rows adjourned again in the seats while the teacher left stud marks in the linoleum tiles on her way up; our maths teacher had always worn heels and not once was she viewed by the human eye without them. If she had it in her everyone had yet to know, because the professionalism was not a bar the faculty were expected to jump and the crisp blue was optional. The principal had already been cultivating, with immense difficulty, towards the uniformity the students possessed, and to keep a teacher in line all at once was a leap beyond the shark's nostrils and all the way, leaking silver, across the nose anchored by the angular face. I pulled from my bag a textbook but obviously had no expectations about its use. It had been a while since a teacher was this lenient with our class, but when it transpired to a tooth and a nail we basked through a sleepiness and the cold, snowy haze. There would be peels when people spoke but most friends dropped their heads down upon their desks. I was much the same, but I was sure that on a given day, assuming I had friends I could perhaps conversate with, there was no doubt in my mind that my mind and its clouded brain cells would be against the fiberwood, half garnished, orange tinted desks provided. 

Laura stood up since she had been the initiator- this action, by the way, had surprised me the most. The segregation was not stagnant then, and it would fall into place and fall into pillar sooner than she would be able to process. Perhaps this was a horrible and selfish thought but I had never been taught to function in any other way. Her skirt was up her ass a bit but I decided against warning her for it would ripple our connection as girls and she would understand then that I had to be looking to catch it. I was looking, of course, but it wasn't in my nature to drop the cards so easily(and perhaps the guillotine depending on the rabidness my recipient held, and that was a different story) and thus I caught my forehead to the wood after a brief and silent goodbye. I wanted to think about fish or hippos or orchids in bloom- I had never seen them before my two material eyes, and they appeared to be the unmatched grace- but it was ramping up difficulty by the millisecond due to a tormenting noise. This was one that should be more familiar than the familial setting to me but it tortured so; I wasn’t sure from what my sudden, intensely oriented stress had rooted from, yet I knew if given the chance it would choose not to deplete. I would have to sit and think, because thinking and sitting was easier than just sitting. 

Disruption. Clothes were in demand from myself, and I had no idea what I was hoping to accomplish with them. If I willed it to appear cute I would place a bow upon my head and wear clumsy reinterpretations of grandmother clothes, which seemed to be the current fashion for some discreet reason. If I willed to look hot it was a lost cause for me. There would be girls gauzed with fishnets creeping up their legs, ivy esque, and they would have the tools to steal away from the rest a man who was too stupid to understand what they were doing. Still, if I were there it would be the right idea indeed to flee from me and court a different person not unique to oneself. I wanted to look right, and as though I influenced within other people’s pathologies a number of patterns that were unthinkable to the human thought process, and it would be an infection that surpassed all virality and gained all vitality and everyone would be swayed to view me, myself, and I as the little god I was. 

I say little god in order to mention the fact that I am skinny. Sometimes, when the aforementioned sitting and thinking is to take place, I reflect on this to regain some egotistical tendencies I had abandoned with my optimism perhaps two fleeting years ago. In this case it would do well- very well, in fact- to grapple this confidence until it was in submission entirely, and then reign it in until my stomach flattened subconsciously, without me sucking it in through my lungs and placing them so close together, so hollow, that they were crisp and grey. Laura must be an oracle because what she had told me about other girls made a fair amount of sense, and it was inexcusable since I had not known it beforehand by name. I was compliant to listen through all this lazy- in that it lays, wishes nothing else upon itself to heighten to relaxed state- advice yet there was a fee placed upon the door stopper. From her I wanted only a few words, but she skipped around them at each notable point until I felt as if I was a jester for expecting them in the first place- ‘you can borrow my clothes’, or thesaurused in various ways, but needless to say it would loop back regardless. She did not think to say it. How unfortunate was I that, from me, people expected a sense of self identity! I would sooner wrap up in the burgundy and the old money bottled up golden and perfumed through the hair, the wrists and the slim neckline curved so that a boy’s mouth might find somewhere to rest along it. 

I would make amends with my wardrobe. This was the sole option remaining: I would cradle and nurse it until when running a hand down its hips there would be, among the unappealing cloud, an imprint that described all the influences lost from Leah. I liked to believe it was impossible that I should find nothing of attraction in it. There was slatered wood, a shadow that expanded by the clothed article and some posters half wittedly and uselessly tacked upon the insulator walls, as when I was a young child but an overgrown toddler I wanted to escape often. Though there was no sand or hourglassed waters or gulls it persevered as a resort. 

Where I wanted to be overcome with fraught nostalgia my chemicals had choreographed a different plan for me altogether, and I could not look back on those times without feeling the discomfort overtake the daisies. It was odd- my childhood was flat, but it was not a concave and thus a peak rose from the grass, however miniscule to the eye. 

We babbled through the school day. It was impossible to fully recline but I didn’t cry blood(from my eyes or elsewhere) so I suppose, in retrospect, that it was a success for me. After all I existed knowing that there would be plenty of salt to rub into my wounds later on that evening when the dancing maximised to full motion. There would be bodies sweeping across what had once identified as a sitting room floor, and their silhouettes were pleasing to view, and it would not be me who could integrate with them in the slightest. 

I have not sororized just yet. I hope to soon. 

The wind was full and brisk on the walk home, and Laura parted from me at the steps. As she faded into the darkness through her routined walkway she turned briefly, threw me a wave, then perhaps to incite some courage of conviction, a thumbs up which I could not quite understand for the life of me. Only three hours would pass before I returned to that exact spot where the gum cut off to holy cement and a chip encrusted the cobble by my ugly school shoe. This would suffocate me with fretting, but I would never, while being honest to myself, boil my worry away and find negative feelings. 

  
  
  


_ CHAPTER TEN _

We arrived far too punctually, and so Laura pulled my arm around hers, forming a diamond one could view the posh rose bushes between, and dragged me about the neighbourhood possibly even three times without pause. I wasn’t an avid fan in regards to walking but it disrobed of me the nerves which had been ticking away, I believe, all evening. It was no longer windy but Laura joked that she wished it was due to the boys that manifested for whatever reason at each tuck store we rounded. Coinciding this was her black miniskirt she had purchased years ago but still felt she could establish a use from(although I must admit that the material did not cling as flattering as other fabrics such as plastic, skin or the tasteful sheer found in beige stockings). Her hand which was set free by effect of not being linked to mine often strayed down her thigh and fixed it so it ‘sat proper’ down her form. I supposed it was useless to wear such labouring clothing, but I supposed it was even more useless to argue what had already knocked from the mantelpiece. It was chilly, in that moment right before the snow wherein all the cats grew three inches fatter from new fur coats, some dotted black or white if the cat was extra cute. We passed them on the pavements at times and I chose to take it as a sign that luck would, for some reason, be astounded by my beauty and chase me about all night. I wanted to end up in someone’s best wishes at one point, because it was so unlike myself to do so. I had wasted through those seventeen years without rectifying myself as a kissless being, and I felt that if my lips were to come into contact with those of another human’s they would, by my proximity, grasp, air, ugliness, oddities crawling about, infesting, turn to stone tucked against me. This was scary, but what made it scarier was that these nightmares first began when I was twelve and have sustained their disconcerting reactions since. My mouth would be too cold, too brittle- it wasn’t there to please others and by extension myself.    
But I needed this, to form a connection that spiraled downwards rather than upon a two dimensional desk, and what I needed moreso was the person who could be ushered through a revolving door and see within me my hormonal yet exceedingly un-hormonal rage, my baggage lifts raised to the heavens but already lowered beneath them to hell, yet they would slip back out before it could be comprehended by a human brain. The glass would slide back into place and my conscience lives another day. The lobby is masked warm to make someone regret their ability to gaze upon the big city posters once more. Still, I was owed a great deal and nothing at all by myself. 

I hacked away at the notions for a while, and the compulsory worry no longer took interest in my environment or Laura’s dazzlingly pointless smalltalk. She had asked the friend not to invite her ex because he would, by dutous means, require a different hand on his torso at all times in order to function the next day, and he “always gets drunk and makes someone ask him what the time is so he can move to look at his watch and spill beer all over someone’s poor, poor carpet! Isn’t that a bit psychopathic? Leah, I said isn’t that a bit psychopathic? Leah?”

“Yeah, sounds that way,” I almost didn’t seem to say. We were back by the rose bushes again, prolonging our moments spent in mindsets not clouded up with breath and alcohol. Starlings plagued my insides, picked, but they were already lined with that beautiful stock and could not be torn apart, only felt in quite the same sting. There were figures through the curtains, sheathed down until they looked like great panels of frost catching a mildew, and each one had something in their grasp regardless of their desires. They moved and swayed about and sometimes pulled each other closer so they formed a single, wider blue, sometimes turning delirious. Laura let me take my arm back- it seemed she didn’t want to be caught chained to someone, so to speak. Or perhaps it was due to my embarrassing tendencies and how I would disappoint this friend of hers on sight. I was left considering all the pathways and horizons and thought processes until I malfunctioned right there on the drive, but she did not notice how my mouth gaped, wondrous as the ordeal was, until we were at the door, having knocked though by this point I found it hard to discern between the daydream and the past tense. 

I confided in her a floundering, but it was dampened down to a horror caught between my retinas. I was uncomfortable in such a way I had not known could be realised, but within me a bubble was brimming over and catching each smouldered ore that was thrown its direction.    
She was not looking at me- who could blame her, really? A hair was rolling in the punches along her neck and I tried my hardest not to pluck it out. Everything appeared hyper detailed and horrifying just as one expected while I waited for the ball to drop-- or the door to swing open, which it did just a moment or two later. I could run but Laura would laugh, and one thing I despise more than unwanted sympathy was laughter at my own expense. 

I could remain still. Very still, and at one point the night would reach a conclusion with me out there on the step. 

A boy had answered the door. Handsome as he was, I felt no thrill delight me to host him before my eyes. His features were so angular they came off as jarring, and I was upset on his behalf with his parents when they had filed for what I assumed was some chiseled genetics, but in the end it squared into a boy to be fawned over, even when one was unwilling to do so. When I mention this 'one' who is quite hesitant to be arrogant on other people's behalfs I am obviously referencing myself. To deem a boy as attractive was quite akin to gifting him some circuits within your very own heart, which he would leap to grasp if only to force you into leaping above successions of hoops slowly approaching a gold. I did not wish to dig myself a hole this soon and anticipated the blacklights within for they would conceal most humanity found upon others, and this was what made me so joyous I felt I could accomplish a president's award when slandering the egoism founded by the blessed few and the scarlet rest before a national broadcasting. Laura was winded from the beginning to behold him, and I wanted too jeer at her or, as minimally as I could pull the rise from the velvet upwards nudge her into my submission rather than his. Down, girl, please don't betray yourself with such ease. Urine never served a purpose down anyone's legs who were not perverse and straying far from a globe that was no longer held up, due to a bat or two on Atticus's behalf which he let transpire. I didn't want her to giddy and the meer idea perplexed me but she spoke to him as if he was a baby, which was a trait unique to Laura due to the odd oedipus complex she contained within her own morale. She looked him up and down but batted her lashes as eh did so- they splintered along her under eyes and for a moment shuttered the pale purple completely- and by the time I could find it in myself to venture the party's grounds and escape the scenario down to the casing she was flirting with him. Her tone wavered as it never did for me, and this fair, sudden despair knocked me from my high horse and I delved with her towards these reddened grounds. 

"Hi, I'm a friend of Jamie's," she said, rising in a manner unfound even within horse girls, though in their defense they never understood when they were afflicted by somebody else's brightness, shining through their eyes or their smile or their hair or the thing let out between their legs, since we all seemed to be teenagers(and often pretended not to be) on the premises. She tucked some hair behind her ear and I stopped my eyes from budging until their staticity depended on whether or not I could feed some vodka to my liver in the foreseeable next few minutes, until all forsight then waved me off to a drunken slobbering. Her miniskirt stopped being fiddled with from that moment on because her hands were caught up in a constant unrest. She distrusted the hair, the calm air with no forks to be found between the clouds, and they would fix her strands again and again to expose her face to him. I felt she should browse some more before buttering him up so much, but then again who was I to know a tint about these matters?However, with the voices spilling out from beneath the door(an ill fitting demise to the alleged partying and one that hid nothing at all) I was lead to believe that god had bounded some figure within to carry around a beautiful face with a set of beautiful expressions. Perhaps this was mine to capture, since I was aware that I filled the gap that the rest had left within the scaffolding and was the sole person to consider the variables that went into this, but it made more than enough sense that this was the detriment I knew I must have, and what would discontinue my entire train of thought. 

I wanted to push past this boy but he was still there, unmoving, with his two legs extending out well past their hotness threshold and indeed the physical threshold, and I wanted him not but his clothes were embellished with a foil thin sweat which rendered all his clothes opaque. His white collared shirt- this was embarrassing to note, by the way- suddenly betrayed all the pink and the red that rested in everybody's gut and some odd skin marks near where his arms grew into the more useless appendages gracing below our necks when the light was switched on behind him. Overhead, it threw around this yellow that left enough room for insects to fester, and the stairs were to be heard as they were trodden with some bare feet. Before I could consider why the steps were so dainty and satisfying in practice I saw a girl emerge behind him with her two heels kept so close to her heart it was almost tender, strengthened by their red polished coating all the way down to the fake Valentino soles that appeared as though she'd wandered through a bloodbath in her time and came out from it a more graceful individual. In observing the dead form she found that minute action was what made us so leisured and tolerable upon other's faults, and she spoke quietly but with self assurance I admired from her. 

I would like to inject some doubt into your brain right now. I will take this moment and mention the fact of the matter, which is that I was not instantly taken, though if I were to be taken by anyone I'm sure it would have been her, or that boy, or Nina, bless her soul, when she was rid from the coffin and ran through by the unforgiving fingertips our reaper himself possessed. She delighted me in the way she moved and how her eyebrows seemed to catch each emotion she underwent before her other features could think to bend over. "Move," she said, "I know them."

"Yeah, I've heard as much," he said, though he did not listen to her. I willed for him to liquidate into something useful such as a paperweight constructed from marrow or hipbone or what have you, but instead he displeased Laura's decency further.Although I wanted nothing more than to bleach from my memory and stipulations the girl's face, I could not turn towards Laura due to the fact that she very well could be quivering at his supposed authority during that moment, and the thought set a subtle disturbance off that ran from my receptors all the way up to the stomach curl that catches all sickness first, and waking, and the motion when set in place but never quite reaching or falling from the expected limits, and it bended against my organs surreally. I was not sure if this baton was realised among the species or if it was quite exclusive to me, but either way its physical attributes were too potent for me to ignore in their entirety. I set my eyes past everything and hoped that one day soon I could be blinded to forgive my appearances, those other people held despite their best interests, and the stoic manner with which both parents maintained whenever they were required by law to see me at all- when I turned eighteen it would grow unheard of until my beams were pulled out from beneath my legs and I was subjected to a great fall. If I reached that age. It was not exclusively that I expected to die soon, but rather I was keeping the prospect open for later use: I willed myself against picking baby names until I first could extend outwards to my wall with my feet and hit a growth spurt until I was left dislocated, reeling between locations, and oriented by a mental patient or a spiteful victim from a past life. 

The colours meshed together until any additives were unnecessary, but my hands strained until the webbing popped up briskly pink, my pinky finger wandering up at times towards what I could only imagine must be the beer pong game in the next room over. I was growing all the more cold since, despite any better gospel that had been drilled through my head by other people's competent teachings, I had decided on a pair of shorts I was not another identity in which was of course the problem. They were black denim and bestowed upon me some time ago, so much so that I could not track them back to any discernible rollection, nor would I force myself to. All I required was the knowledge that they spanned across my entire rear and did not bunch where my legs amputated vaguely into a waist, as every girls' seemed to. I pushed a hand down the semas nonetheless but no netting presented itself to me. 

"Jamie!" Laura said, after some silence finally deciding to remark who she had, in previous iterations, been stoked to see, and had waddled out past her garden for donning some fine pussy cat heels she carved from herself the stature to pull off but not the full ability as it came packaged. Her store bought amiability greyed a bit then, perhaps due to the fact that she was hopped up on the specifics about this 'hunk' who I assumed I should also be swooning over but never into. "I haven't seen you in ages!"

"You sure you're seeing me now?" Jamie said, then laughed for some reason inaccessible to the rest of us, but I theorised upon its first use greatly until the formulas within my brain betrayed my idiocy and crashed, collided through a jumble, scrap heap leaping out to catch the flared light. She smoothed her dress down her sides and I followed without meaning to- unfortunately, you must interpret this as a walk with the eyes down the dotted line until the river was reached. I wanted to reach out to her, subsequently feel the rejection burn through when an axe passed through my wrist, thus sending the bone fragments in a shuttle carraige up to the heart canals until I laid out, punctured, bleeding red as a pigeon. I wanted her to hurt me for whatever reason: the acceptance would make little sense in this scenario. To feel grounded and concrete I reached the conclusion that I required some suffering at the hands of those I wished to hold. This was why I grew magnetic when she ignored me for a while, excluded my face perhaps from her vision which was an action rendered doable due to what I assumed must have been quite the alcohol intake. She took me in after a while, yet a sneer was not found within her dictionary at a stranger's loss. I pulled Laura through the door before I could change my mind(this would be all the more appropriate to considering doing in such an instance) and we were streamed after by the clicks from the heels and the putter from the gum sole shaped out to a gigantic, fashionable white block, one after the other. The room I found myself in was not one that was laced with any descriptive words due to not what was bland when swerved, but rather what was a fountain forever dispensing the neons that one could not make a blind person aware of by name alone, without any sight. The walls were nowhere to be found because the density was clumped together all the more- voices could not travel but they somehow were recepted with subconscious duty by my ears nonetheless. The lights were dim but not so much that I should fret about which opticians office I would find myself in after a week drawing to my own attention some dashed symptoms and some artificial ones exerting a real undertone. I wanted to fix my hair behind my ears but my arms could not raise up above the short's shoulders or the tall's elbows, and thus everything was a boarded matter. 

Jamie followed behind us, which I feel is important to mention since we are now accepting the reality in which I would recite an endless monologue akin to those found within the bible if it was a guaranteed bed to be made the next morning.Should it be adorned by rosed sheets I would all the more find myself bowing justly. The carpet was quickly reclaimed from my heels. I stood there, struck, coldwired, bearing nothing but a hollowness for a moment that ran over into two that ran over into three that ran over into four that ran over into five that ran over into six that ran over into seven that ran over into eight that ran over into nine that ran over into ten that ran over into eleven that ran over into twelve that ran over into thirteen that ran over into fourteen that ran over into fifteen that ran over into sixteen that ran over into seventeen that ran over into eighteen that ran over into nineteen that ran over into twenty that ran over into twenty one that ran over into twenty two that ran over into twenty three that ran over into twenty four that ran over into twenty five that ran over into twenty six that ran over into twenty seven that ran over into twenty eight that ran over into twenty nine that ran over into thirty that ran over into thirty one that ran over into thirty two that ran over into thirty three that ran over into thirty four that ran over into thirty five that ran over into thirty six that ran over into thirty seven that ran over into thirty eight that ran over into thirty nine that ran over into fourty that ran over into fourty one that ran over into forty two that ran over into forty three that ran over into forty four that ran over into forty five that ran over into forty six that ran over into forty seven that ran over into forty eight that ran over into forty nine that ran over into fifty. It was a coma prolonged by some force I had no capacity to understand, but still it propelled my remainders to freeze against the flesh- of myself, of others. The shorts were gaining some livelihood when it came down to their persecution by their manager, handler and owner, but when I became ice and my hands froze with the fingertips crunched together uncomfortably, I recognised it as more horrendous that I had first presumed. Jamie was ridded without formal disengagement from the barracks and instead a new age was ushered in with the regulations altered to the occasion, the electricity resounding moreso through the air but passing through me as if I were a paper and an alpha ray and nothing more, but perhaps that was what I expected from myself more than anything. 

Jamie could have my neck studded to a chokehold but it would bear little meaning, for I saw a face in the crowd I had come to associate with that aforementioned heat curl but only when it warped to resemble a lightness unbeknownst to me. 

His hair was altered to appeal moreso to the crowd, though the idea that he had prepared to win people over sat me down and engaged me in an ongoing, drivellous smalltalk in which I held a great deal of interest but willed against my own views in this regard. He had never illuminated a disclosed space so much before- I wish not to smother this up until love was reclaimed through the gluttonous human shame, but it was a moment to be pinned forever against my epitaph should it be needed recklessly soon- although it grew darker by the moment and each face swiped into a black abyss to accentuate his facial composition which seemed to be treated softly by the pool, the light shimmering through a surface and diamonding once more the turquoise into ravenous, irresistible sections I wanted nothing more than to run my tongue down. I drew closer despite myself; I drew closer to the neighbour boy, for the first recorded time wearing something other than plaid pyjamas tucked with an unfamiliar forgiving attitude I would not run beneath myself. He wore jeans and a t shirt, as Laura's oracular divinity had predicted just hours ago before I had known a true wave of change as I did now. I was not sure what about him enthralled me so but it had been inescapable since the incident involving the window, the hinge, the night hair and the listless pacing about a room being observed listlessly by a fool such as myself. I knew that I had found my beautiful face for the evening and would now stride to see it ripple over with disgust until I knew positivity under no better a name. However much I despised downing, whether it be confined between jacket fabric or in English maps, I reserved myschedule to lay some hands towards a drink; ingesting courage was the only thing that would further establish my desire and my lust. I knew that once it overcame me my jaw could not shatter beneath my weighty words once more and they would spill over his face until I could spill over his lap. I held some contempt for myself when I fled from the entourage in order to allocate anything at all, and a stronger contempt even so nodding towards him, but I knew it could not be helped and was diligent enough that I allowed it to occur with some self imposed mercy I had never once tasted before. 

The only table I could remove glimpses from was pushed against the back wall. I supposed it had once been pushed back by humans who had consciously decided it must not impose upon the white carpet(now marred and bruised over by muddy shoes of course, though I doubt I even need to mention this fact) yet now it was being held in place by bodies sprawled across its rim, pushing down liquid until the plastic crunched aggressively in their hands. I removed myself from some person's grasp and pushed another girl over- she was inebriated, therefore it would not be remarked if I were to disgrace her entire extended family before her shuttering eyes- until her brown hair sloped over her shirt and covered her chest. Some went between her mounds and trickled downwards, almost; I thought then how horrible it would feel to wake up after the fact with my hair woven into my bralet. Yet the cups were put up for auction by this human interaction, whether it be social or physical interaction, and it was affordable enough that I underwent it twice and gained twice the amount I had set out for. It was my first time drinking anything more than a sip from my brother's cider at festive family outings(we had for some reason been trailed about these throughout my childhood and his one, extended by a gap year between the graduation and non committal part times and the next few years invested into a degree) but the bitterness was not, and I could not gather why, unfounded, but rather an unpleasant hum that could be scented all the way down to the puddled liver. Soon it would be puddled at least, if it all fell into place just as I had imagined. It was of great importance that the puddling would draw from me a courage I had not yet known, nor would ever know again. It would be blinding and scalding and it would work miracles upon the psyche, yet the drawback lay in the fact that the recipient would be distantly aware that their mind would never be put to good use ever again towards the drivelling back trails most associated with a perfect uproar or an astonishing conclusion. I pulled myself together and stitched down the hems with the liquor until my skin founded a featherous touch. It sat nicer than before, and infinitely better than my predisposed ideas had believed possible; this was a motion wherein I was made aware that there were many oysters upturned for the rich, the insulting and the powerful, but for Leah there could be a single one who was assigned a loser’s, tempestuous role she would attain with ease. This role was sitting too close to ignore. 

I slipped through the crowd once more, though the task had increased in difficulty and heavy handedness due to the song change which now resulted in some bass heavy track every single person somehow had worked into themselves the ability to remember each word as if a treacle, and I worried that it wouldn't be the time but I also knew that I would never find a moment or a hand if not now, and a hand was what I desired more than this edging life that knew no bounds to lack of conclusion, general unpleasantness or distaste. As I was drawing closer he knew nothing about who I was- this comforted me enough to follow through until we were eyeballs apart, several but it could not have been too many, and his pupils zeroed in on my form. I was pleased enough that my mouth upturned. I had not been one for instantaneous niceties before but it was endearance that would round it all up for me. 

"Hey," I said to him, working through a smile until the task less resembled endurance and moreso claimed a natural ability that was replicated from those who knew more on the subject than me. He was standing but I had not seen him speaking to- nor dancing, god forbid- with anyone yet, and it stood out to me more than anyone else that it really should be me who he batted for when it came to the backboard. The slamming noises against the wall would do and even punctuate an eroticism suitably, a heat ran downwards but I was not sure if this was puddling or something else, or perhaps puddling in an unrecognised form, a stranger upon my form at the very least, and one I would need to beg to stay if it had not continued doing so regardless. He was looking back at me! It was so odd to be such a voyeur that being viewed in the real life was akin to being caught by those wandering eyes affixed to a misconcepted ideal of purity. I wished for nothing more than to behead him and from his cheekbones consume the blood where it lay most thin. I imagined, from time to time, that it would be bittersweet but perhaps in the literal sense rather than the metaphorical one. I cradled the idea while we looked to each other for an immeasurable regeneration- my arm becoming a stranger, my head becoming a fish bowl. His hair would begin to grow and I would not notice as I would be far too caught through the hurricanes surpassed by all but tiem in its most focused, sharpened moments. I prayed to god though I had never from him seeked a vengeance upon my sadness before. To ask for the one thing besides a blessing... I would rather have known then rather the turning away would play out or not, and if it should then I would erase him from my memories entirely, abandoning some peels about how much I adored the way he looked in my heart to only submerge when I impossibly greeted him again, but this would never be slated to happen and therefore it was a compound to worry nothing about. 

"Hey," he said back, though I could not detect much of anything from his tone. What I mean by this was that it was quite the task to even hear him, but working past this to a flowing meaning was a task not suited for me in that rocking moment. Speaking of rocking- I was already magnified by my shame in his presence, but it was diminished by the puddling until my legs spiralled about the floor and I caught myself jiving. For a novice it was delightful to suddenly be handed the information that I had a motion within my blood stream in the first place. I followed his swaying and attempted to match it with my own, but even then the paint thinner heightened from his breath- he had been drinking just the same, been overtaken by the bull at the door and now the china lay in blue gridded fragments that not a human would beg to touch. I licked my lips once but not for effect so much as habit; still his eyes wandered downwards in that cinematic spiel I had often time dismissed verily and with all the desire to do so in the world. I could live off it for hours, but now that it transpired before me I now found myself begging and my knees willing for a cold tile or a white carpet or anything at all, should it detangle a fragment from him. "I'm Alex," he said then, and it would make sense should I collapse right there. I was growing delirious by the second though the factors were too numerous to discern without any blur. 

I wanted to ravage him. I thought some more about this, about how I had wished for nothing more than to behead him and from his cheekbones consume the blood where it lay most thin. This Alex boy- I had already decided that I would be renting him out for the evening, and the night should he enjoy it enough to allow my strangeness to consume him until he was nothing but hte  hardened bones left over from the kiln. I swept him up with my gaze- or at least I felt I did, my drunken mind overcoming any reasoning I had once been familiar with until it was belittled to as little an importance as celebrity talk shows on the live television I'd watched- and the confidence was what burdened my coffin with its final nail, drove the wooden stake through my heart, etcetera. I wanted to bend over to this smarminess until I could "flirt", as I had heard it being referred to, but I was no expert on these matters in the slightest and just being myself would not service me well by the end of it. 

"I'm Leah," I told him and tried to leak out a sincerity, but I was still being struck with that tearing heat. I pushed up against him and pushed myself back again within much the same progressive note, and he slumped a bit beneath what was honestly very little weight. "Sorry, I'm really drunk," I laughed. This was a move which I chose to believe caused him to laugh in the identical manner, perhaps if I was so unlucky emulating my own for his own jest that was more grounded than any attempts I had the ability to make. 

"Me too. I'm fucking... wasted, man I'm wasted," he said and his words seemed to press against my neck until it was binded by him. My breathing constricted until I was on cloud nine, soaring perhaps being the word, and the lack of colour about me transfused with my optimistic ideals until it was the monotone that worked to make my being function. He was drunk too, and this was a gift that must have been reserved for my observance by my god himself. I missed when I had been a catholic in primary school for it had served me well, as once it was money I wished for my birthday struck and a relative was struck(with death) and I inherited a lump sum on account of being the preferred sibling. This was what laying low had taught me well, but now conviction ate up my shoes until I walked a manner most envied from the rest and my smile took on a limp yet lustful note some more. If the gods had worked it all out so that I might kiss him in the next hour and witness some working, warm lips that dashed mine with care, I would be able to commit suicide to my fullest potential in the morning and be swept off by a high tide against the rocks. Fishermen would reel me up from a distant rockpool and wonder how I was so disembodied yet lacking so many methods of harm upon me. How could I have ever believed that drink would fail me so much and condition my brain to a nervous state that never quite pittered out when the sobriety finally took its turn with me? I was flaring up all over in the majestic presence, caught thinking much the same about myself- and it went without saying that perhaps it would never be the same girl after this, and instead I would resolve to poke holes through others without the guilt passing through my fibers just once. I would frolic in school, knowing with all the tells that tomorrow would be another day wherein I succeeded those I was among in almost all facets- or at least the once that held any importance to me, and thus the world. I pushed myself against him again in order to gauge whether or not within me he had found a comfortable sleight; if he had not it would exist as a further cautionary tale bt I was so wrapped up the task of growing offended was more daunting than being slapped backwards with immediate satisfaction gabled over in melancholy. He pushed back towards me, though not with two hands upon my shoulders and a fury I would record for later use: rather, his body found mine and decided it would do for a while, perhaps to rest against. 

I was overcome with an unknown pleasure. I was overwhelmed by much the same effect, but they were intractable and irreplaceable and I found myself, for some reason, upset by this, that my romance could never blossom until I had found whatever it was I held to my chest that would gravitate a being towards me without sympathy or warrant. He had not warned me that he was interested, yet my self esteem was not so low that I found each factor easier than the last to ignore. An odd, titillating screen filtered in each place wherein I was pressed to him and he was pressed to me. I smiled forever, though I knew it was at once ongoing as it was drawing to a close. The coffin was white in this regard, harpooned through by countless peonies looped through with whatever satin ribbon a stall girl could bring it upon herself to extend. I wanted him, and I yearned for him. Yet it was far too much, too soon, to consider this change that had just ruined me, this new experience bringing to life an inner circle I had not once viewed as a collective; he would leave me soon, towards the end, and make off with a lift to his house, wherein he would pace some more before clutching his sheets into a dreamless sleep. Not once would he reconsider my face- it would not dissolve to ugliness, but if the beauty were to be believed it would not open up for examination or regard either.

This was not connection. The room stifled about me, the walls cramped closer for a companionship- the people bombarded without moving at all. An apple was glossed and dampened by a shoe polish, the strudelled kind that bore no discolouration- and I felt it all, the sin lick up near me and coo my name for it was one that had not solely been cleared, but rather had been embedded with a fondness for a bed that was so far from mine. I was curious and all the more so when he looked back at me, for the alcohol ran through my brain a flood but I had ground enough to contemplate his thoughts. What would he expect from me- would it be a utility to apply wherever his own lifestyle cramped together, or a flattener for velvet that raised at inappropriate turns, cuts and bends? I disappeared for a while, perhaps a moment or two, though my body seemed to recept the electricity throughout the room and mold it into dance. My mind was above the clouds and the satellites but it had an abrupt collision with landscape nonetheless. I wanted to still but it was not an option, and Laura was faded out through the yellows the fashion disciples had boasted upon themselves, and Alex was looking back at me, though he transcribed nothing in regards to his actual formed opinions, the warmth they received him in when he returned from ideas about me all night. 

I wanted to be that girl who lurked in other people's dreams. It was a misery to do so, to expend happiness upon the degradating they underwent, but it heated me so that they should interpret any meaning from my cold, indifferent solitude at all, and they would never quite understand that it was a solitude drawn up to my forehead at each given opportunity all my life. I would not change nor could I hope to. It was no longer a matter of the choosing or the stalling, yet I grew all the more aware that my body would one day plague some public space with a reek. Suicide was what those of us who had felt abandoned by air resorted towards, and often times it would be more satisfying to extricate oneself alongside a beauteous, dramatic occupant. I composed the idea from the beginning, since the party had been announced to me; I knew that no matter how my luck curved I would one day end up in this power play between myself and my lesser no stronger half. 

Alex was not equipped with the intelligence to understand an infernal breakdown, it seemed, because he did nothing to aid me in any way whatsoever. I pulled him against me but when he smiled back I felt no need to do anything about it. A divorce would become quite necessary and my hair would have to be salon bobbed before I set foot within the courtroom, while my nails were embedded until the purple gel could catch some light in my face and dilute beyond the sunny outside even when it rained or poured.   When I realised with a start that I was moments away from crying I began to seek out an escape route, though it was no easy feat and certainly not one to undermine for the bustle was magnifying at an extended rate and showed no signs of stilling for even a moment. Before it had been a struggle with arms but now it was the decay within them, the fillings heavy and dense for the foggied brain that had the wool drawn before its cells with some willingness and some self defeat, yet I could not shake the desire until it had expanded a heat stemming up from my gut and scratching with cold nails up against the roof of my mouth. I pushed Alex away but swerved my head sideways so I caught a segregated couple out on the floor arguing about something or other, pans away from a restraining order or two; I knew that if the stacitity had not fizzled with the oil I would get to see him appear hurt or worse, contented. 

If he was contented in that second I would never bring myself to know. I would not ask him or seek out the information through mutual lines, but it ate at me even as the overwhelm blotched up all saturation my chemical makeup had ever known. I had spent time earlier before a mirror, which was a daunt when it came down to myself, and my face was more in line than it had been the day before but the features were not linked together by mutual prettiness. Instead it was the white odour that did it for them. I would not lose it soon, but instead I let on that I could not care less- this was a lie, of course, but when I knew it it was gifted the lock and key a painful humming was kept under. I threw myself through the crowd but felt scorched with each contact. The music droned, pulsed as though it were a sensation rather than a sense in which I could lay my head to chop. Crowds were not particularly satisfied when I rioted in a full square across the room, in search of some door that would lead not to another neon reiteration laced all the same by the vodka and the kissing and sometimes the actual exchanging only those who were satisfied held the ability to complete. I was jagged through elbows at times until the tears had began to push, with brute force, against the diamonds at the corners of my eyes- this was a trait we all held but only the less defined could murder to a 'diamond'. The white light sloped off it nonetheless, two v shapes pointing through a bridge together. I needed the bathroom, or something like that, was my excuse when someone I could trace back to a painful salt confronted me in regards to my dashing. I was being called from home and it was a lie that had paved my commute in the first place. Urgent. My mother was over protective to the point where she claimed me as her daughter and she wore white almost exclusively, and when she sat one leg flipped over the other until it was a submissive little fold against the stark. She would not make do with excuses, nor would my father for that matter, and they wanted me to return shortly but I hadn't a lift and thus I would spend some time mapping out the public transport that wandered near my midland estate, though sprawling and inconvenient and at this hour ghostly. I needed to attend to some immediate business in my hometown wherein I was some matron saint or what have you. Any excuse would do, and to Alex I was quite unsure whether or not I could show my face without, to him, proclaiming some lie which would cause him to take pity on me- those with empathy rarely questioned due to their nature, and for the most part the idea that anything could be false testimony still bore no reason to be cross examined when the tone was possessing enough. 

I crept up the stairs where the furniture was unnoticed. There was a washing line strung in the hall which was not something one would expect from the elaborate downstairs decor, perhaps strung together by someone who carried about a swatch book along with their cheque book and their James Joyce book and their cigarette case, which was made to resemble a hardcovered book, the binding a metal clasp. Upstairs told a different name entirely, and betrayed some fictional Jamie that had no inhibitions to associate with a humane turn of life. The clothes line was unoccupied save for a single white apron that cast a low shadow across the adjoining wall, though it was so bright that it was not given much room to impose within and swell out the corners. The window was slotted in by the dusk and a door at the very end had a poster vaguely tacked to it, some screen printed image found in a Japanese folklore book- if I had to assume, of course, though this was not within my realm of expertise as I had never made it my duty to stray far from where my rocks landed. I was astounded momentarily from the harboured emotions. There was something wondrous that latched itself onto every surface I looked over, and every door was dusted with some signifying mark. My voyeuristic nature for the last time perhaps demanded some attention from the captured motor functions, and it told me that to enter Jamie's room would be to set a price upon social standing that could not be valuable enough for what I really, really wanted. Because it would sprawl endlessly with charm just as she had, and if not I could sit with a newfound comfort in my position upon the ladder, knowing that she was a monotonous creature all along who had been posing behind some nonsensical splendour. Her room was easy to identify. If asked by forensics, I could do it with no previous insight other than some skepticism towards her choice of painting upon the door; it was a portrait scriptured in so many colours they never grew to stand out, but it was not washed nonetheless. The brush strokes were sometimes long yet they never delved into any tedious interpretations, and oftentimes it was freeing to witness the carefree skill involved. A woman was etched into the center wherein the sky parted to a yellow hazed beneath a blue, and upon her face was a jewel that was not the standard upon a feminine charm yet should soon be scribed as such. There was a long, arching eyebrow, just the one painted a hazardous black but unforgivably noticeable, and its forgiveness was not an item I wished to hold for later use or expansion. I only allowed myself to admire for an allotted few seconds for I did not want to, more than anything else, be caught closed handed within my prawl. The accomplishing would happen now and later unravel to some downtime, and although I had abandoned a strength nameless to all it was no longer lingering upon my cheeks down the pink streams. 

I pushed the door open. The hinge rattled, but lead way to a smooth stroke. Within the walls were bare and just red enough that they could not be deemed empty, and it would all do to be touched up in some places with floral assortments of the evergreen kind, the fresh pine captured potently through the crimps. The bed was made but the pillow was propped up against the entire horizontal backboard of which one might sit against while watching a television set, but it would make close to nonsense if one wished to sleep with their legs that far off the mattress; at that point the better idea was perhaps the creation involving an absence where the memory foam had once squared out, beneath a thin peach duvet collection that warped in sinister manners beneath the light. 

It was far too sterile, and I was astounded to fit the reaction. I had expected something of an anomaly between the walls but instead it laid in the fact that nothing excited me in the slightest. It was all the generic, nameless furniture one would find along with French definitions in a textbook or some memorabilia from a quieter life she had long since forgotten, but it held no significance and set out no waves across her surface and thus it couldn't hope to force up anything from my liver. 

I was drunk enough that I stumbled out to the bedset, which I imagined to be parted from a twinset, and sat against the aforementioned pillow which was too large for a human girl's head. It was comfortable enough that I could have dozed off should I have seen it fit, but in that moment I wanted nothing more than to cry still. It would not reach me. It was as if I had lost the ability altogether. It was as if I would never regain my footing and integrate within the amphitheater worn through with blue once again. It was as if I could witness a third death and not once feel a sting, nor any bother. It was as if my purpose had been removed from my innards before it could be mentioned, not yet granted, and now it evaporated to a useless thinner. I could not bring myself the misfortune that held hands, most commonly, with pain. Furthermore my tear ducts no longer sustained a susceptibility towards the water works- not the kind they had once maintained in any case. My diamonds were nothing more than pointless designs of my own invention. I reached out to a god for lack of anything else to do upon that bet, after the duvet had crumpled beneath a weight obstructed from a mask that a thin girl, so say I, Leah, asked for and received and never threw away, but it was hard to tell what was a miracle welling up from the ceiling or a distant night insect that had materialised from the window pane. I pushed my hair back and my mouth wobbled relentlessly, though once more it was to no avail or veil at all. I regretted then ever letting Alex go, because it now was a distant misinformation that he was fraternising with his peers in my absence, trodding over my train and even spilling upon it a lust that was not misplaced so much as placed. 

This was what almost brought a tear but alas, the extreme absence was once again weighed up to myself. 

Downstairs there was a sudden uproar in what I imagined must be some conclusatory collapse that had prevailed after a drinking game, perhaps some boy that was done in with alcohol poisoning and now mopping up his own liquid syrup vomit from the floor by the scruffed hair. The crowd would watch with delight, having never before seen someone in such immense yet disengaging pain, and Laura would imitate the flock while herself repressing the reactionary horror she suffered by result of her own considerate habits. 

The door opened while I was distracted with these musings. I was at once clutching myself, though I had remained fully clothed throughout the time in Jamie's room- perhaps it was an embarrassment at being caught, through the prison eye, with my face so scrunched from despair and general upset and not being upset. I could not budge when the shoe moved over and I recognised it, though I had not attained the capacity to look down upon the floor when I was still among the party animals or whatever they indulged in calling themselves. 

Alex walked across and sat next to me. He seemed to be mildly infuriated, but perhaps plagued regardless. His face was scorched over as though he had been blistered beneath a tanning booth for enough time that peroxide could be sampled from his natural skin. Perhaps he had been biding his time- he was wanting to reach me but the option fell from grace long before he could pick it up, and after some persistent tumbling it now landed us both where we sat until a moment passed in silence. I, to him, was a girl who had thrust herself upon him just a few moments earlier than I had retracted all interest supposedly, but it was not with this demeanour that I wanted to cast out my first impression or engrave it verily. I withdrew a slight amount until a tile could be fit between our thighs and I chose not to speak first. I made aware by my esteem that, even if I had wanted to, I would not know where to start let alone where the bite it off until we were both content enough and could remove it all, detangle all preconceptions we had developed in the ways of each other's rosiness until we were receptive strangers again on the prowl, looking to hook up with others who were lead astray with enthusiasm greater than had ever been adorned upon ourselves. He was illuminated in the brighter light and along his skin it ignited an attraction even more specific than I'd previously thought from him. When he looked at me it went without saying that my pupils hit the dash line and bounced up to the ceiling once more, a recoil sounding out in the unwavered silence. 

Alex was developing something within him, whether it be patience or commitment or opinions or confidence or whatever it may be. Soon it would overflow and I would suffer a great deal, but for now we were tucked up, compacted hormones crushed in magenta tins that impacted on each other only with the occasional smirk. Any sadness I had diminished as I was far too taken with being busied by his presence, and I did not know how to react or what exactly a girl should expect to feel in this situation. He pushed closer to me and opened his mouth, as though he were about to say something. 

He did not say a thing at all. I believe now that the intentions were lined with self doubt to the point where he threw all the caution down the pier, but his hand met my neck and my lips could finally be courteous enough to host those of another person's. It was a first time moment wherein I had my expectations dragged through a muddened state until they were stained red to the end. I went hot downwards again in a large strike, but it was not a libido like territory so much as it existed to replace my romantic inclinations in practice, though biologically I could not have said that I had predicted this behaviour within myself. His lips were cold and punchy from drink. They were jagged at the edges, in desperate need of some slick, but they were the first ones I had been given the keys to this way and I felt indebted despite my common sense and even myself. It would have at one point been timid if not for the delirious state, but then it was messy and without caution but the pleasure had translated over well enough that he pressed closer towards me. It was ravenous almost, and though exhilarating the movement somewhat tipsied me in an unflattering manner until I willed for it all to be blocked out with a sudden fell chop. The motions ruminate into a slow burn that lead to him pulling away just a lobe, and his mouth was close enough to mine that I could from it taste the emitted percentage glow when he spoke again. 

"Sorry, I got really bored downstairs. It's boring. Everyone's just dancing and no one's talking, and the drinking games all stopped ages ago cos some fucked spilled booze all over the place and now Jamie's freaking the fuck out cos she says she'll get caught. I don't really see the issue- when you have parents like hers, I guess, who needs friends? Or maybe I don't know what I'm talking about. About friends, I mean. Sorry," he rounded it out, endearing and rambling but not without any fault. He kept his arm close against mine but our hands never found the conviction to make glove lining from the human skin. "And then I just came up here to like, take a piss, I guess, but also you ditched me and you were acting all upset and I was so confused, so when I came in here because I thought I heard crying I wasn't completely shocked to see you or anything. Cos I had kinda guessed that you were crying a bit anyway. Not that it affects me, I'd rather just say it than not. If you think I'm a weirdo I can leave and go downstairs and get sick in the rubbish dispenser they have in the sink cos they're rich and then I'll find someone I know enough to vent to until they tell me that there are plenty of fish in the sea, and still it's been seventeen years and I've seen no evidence to prove that one. So since it's not real for me I guess it can't be real at all. You know what I mean?"

"Not really," I said, suddenly feeling a bit weak. I pushed him away and smelled something distant that was invading us both, body snatching the horrible air freshener jacked into the sockets by the lampshades. It was tinging and from it a dark undercurrent waved. The indifference, unassured pursuit towards the smell once more was making a fool out of both me and my nose, but I stuck with it until I detected something quite off drifting up the stairs. The lowness rose up to my shins and then my feet, which were restless to kick at my own shins one after the other. I wanted to kiss Alex again though my interest was wavering in miniscule peels. I was a hunter and I willed it so that my bow no longer could be cable constricted by my own impairment or a boy I shared the room with, though not in the manner either of us had wished. I was a hunter and I would scavenge until my source was running flesh blood through the garters and the lace and even the latex. I was a hunter, I told myself, because I knew it would roll out to be a quicker funeral if I strolled down the stairs now and witnessed what it was that the fret had been caused by, because distantly there was indeed this reek harvested not from sour food or foul food or rotten food or flesh described with the same starter adjectives or whatever you like indeed, but it would not do to remain even with the mouths joining and all the other niceties that stalled my hunter activities. 

I made the ends smother each other when I pushed away from him and stood up. First, his eyes wandered down my front, then as if they were rolled against the door they stopped for a sudden beyond what I could comprehend with any seriousness. 

We both took downstairs when the screaming began- it was not drunken, woozy yelling wherein the tonsils were exposed through their entirety to a limescaled oxygen stifling up a limescaled room packed with limescaled individuals. It was torturous and bold; the kind of gut wrenching scream that girls would be embarrassed to make for fear of a jestful theme placed upon their struggles after the fact. The blood was churning into each and every victims' guts when the shoe hit the last step and the entire floor glowed an orange. The abruptness threw me off until a serenity hijacked my soul and made me its own instrument to use in its darkest moments, or perhaps lightest depending on whether any change would be enacted. People were out on the lawn crying, but the door was jammed by someone who had gotten a lace stuck just where the corner met the plaster and it would be expected to swing. The sitting room was entirely devoured by a large, swelling flame that had, I assumed, already began to digest those among its horrific peril. Perhaps it seems as though I am a sociopathic brand when it comes to calmness, but there was no soul to be crushed when I witnessed it rapture a girl to a crisp and I felt I must take flight or, if that was barred, drop dead right where I had began checking it all down the margins. My head grew so hefty I could no longer stand to bear it much longer, amassing some weight from nowhere and in general being quite the hassle to have acquired but I was, as you can guess, stuck with it even when I had finally fled onto the grass with Alex. Laura was watching too, but one sleeve occasionally lifted and when it was removed her eyes puffed up a slight amount more. 

  
  
  


_ CHAPTER ELEVEN- DELIRIUM _

The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. The fire. The death. 

And how I had not died. 

From my head, growing all the more heavy, some bulbous pieces of flesh were drooping off, downwards and sometimes even into my eyes. I could not discern what they were in those waking moments afterwards but it was a matter in which my entire face most certainly was decomposing. 

When I woke up, it was not surrounded by gifts and friends and heart monitors, for I was in a basement and tied to the wireset bed, bound by the wrists that were charcoaled so, but my wings were constricted more than they had been even in the human packaging and I was far too grateful when I remembered, just then, what my roots really had been all along.    
My aunt prepared me for the waxing. My head had melted from the heat, she said, all over the lawn, and whoever had seen my truest self was long dead. There were some positives to the stature all homunculi maintained after all, she had promised. For I was indeed a homunculi wishing forever to assimilate with humans, imprinted upon by my aunt as a creator and my parents who had never quite cemented that maternal and-or paternal roles within my life. My memories will soon be stripped from me and I will move to a new town. There, the experiment will live on. Soon the critics will applaud my aunt’s- no, my creator’s work, gushing that they had never believed a human composed from mosquito DNA and wax melded prosthetic humanity could ever present as a school girl. 

But then again, hadn’t I been a bit odd all along?

 

_ The End _


End file.
